27/06/06

Wall Street Journal on LibraryThing

There’s an article out today in the WSJ covering LibraryThing [although this link may expire in 30 days time].

It’s a puff piece, but a pretty detailed one which will no doubt bring LT to the broader attention of readers, and probably the publishers who really should be looking at this as a great idea for how to pursue the ‘long tail’ as well as ‘word of mouth’ – the two holy grails of bookselling I have mentioned in the same breath as LT here before.

Certainly it does a good job of articulating the value of LT and the central concept. Which isn’t that hard, let’s face it, unless you haven’t been there. In which case, just go there. Here’s my library by the way.

Here are some quotes

Unlike Amazon’s sales model, however, LibraryThing’s recommendations are powered by the tastes of its members. And, as he’s quick to point out, online booksellers “have to be selling you stuff that’s in print” — while LibraryThing is far more interested in the concept of the “long tail.”

And, Mr. Spalding argues, generating picks based on an entire collection is far more revealing than focusing on purchases. “The stuff that you own is just a very powerful expression of your self,” Mr. Spalding says. “These catalogs represent a lifetime of collecting.”

Because of this intimacy, LibraryThing can also connect likeminded readers — a sort of MySpace for bookworms. But the object is always to find more books, not to kindle online relationships or cliques. “It’s not about who you connect with as friends, it’s about who you connect with through books,” Mr. Spalding explains.

Which is probably the central point of LT’s value to the industry. Next,

“Tagging” is one of the more highly billed Web 2.0 concepts15, a function that allows individual users to ascribe categories to online content. On LibraryThing, librarians tag the books in their own collections to create indexes far more vibrant16 than anything the Library of Congress could handle. The nation’s official repository, Mr. Spalding points out, has no equivalent to LibraryThing’s user-created “southern vampire17″ tag.

With the help of tags, genres become more precise and refined: Where the science-fiction section of a bookstore is overly broad, LibraryThing users can draw distinctions between “steampunk18″ and “cyberpunk19.”

“LibraryThing tags are really about memory, how you think about your books,” he explains. “If you do that, and everyone does that, there is a web of meaning that develops.”

Personally I don’t tag very much at all. But maybe I’m lazy. I think it’s a great idea and am intrigued to see how Amazon gets on with its tagging [links to lots of great comments] and other web 2.0 services.

Finally, we have:

“The most important thing that we’ll look at is the data,” explains Boris Wertz, operating chief at AbeBooks. “The book publishing industry is one of those rare businesses where the producers very rarely listen to consumers.” Gathering insight into thousands of book collectors’ entire collections, he believes, will help book sales develop into “a demand-driven business in the future.”

The arrangement might one day put AbeBooks “feature” content onto LibraryThing, Mr. Spalding says, but won’t end his site’s connection to rival booksellers like Amazon. “You can buy your books from wherever you want to buy your books,” he adds.

And, more importantly, the deal won’t diminish the role of user-created content on the site.

Personally, I like the quote from Abe above. If I still worked in publishing, I’d use LT for lots of things. Not only to help me write pitch / AI information – for readers of Joan Didion …[LT connects to...] and so on but for all of the marketing information it offers. Of course, one danger is that publishers could create multiple accounts on LT, and start only collecting books from their own imprints, which would begin to start skewing the data.

The same thing might happen if Abe booksellers begin indexing their inventories on LT: instead of books being matched by readers who have enjoyed a previously random set of books, the more arbitrary condition would occur where books become related simply by being stocked by the same seller.

I’m not for a minute suggesting that this is a tactic that should be employed – quite the opposite and any corporate involvement in social networking/user generated content is bound to be met with derision and massive critique – but irrespective of that, if I were still in publishing I would try very hard to experiment with LibraryThing in as legitmate means as possible of connecting to readers, and marketing titles.

One final thing. When will we begin to see LT pages for books creeping up the Google rankings to compete with Amazon? Tim has been quoted as saying that bloggers are beginning to link to LT pages rather than Amazon pages, which is phenomenal (although I think those LT pages could be made a lot better). Let’s hope this reaches some kind of search tipping point soon.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Future of the book, Librarything, Publishing.

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