Thanks for the interesting analysis. Apart from th...

2007-12-31T13:02:00.000-08:00

Thanks for the interesting analysis. Apart from the principals, there aren't many people thinking about the little "social cataloging" industry. I'm going to keep chewing it over but, for now, I'll just leave a note on why data-exchange is tough.

The trick is that the data models are rather different. LibraryThing stores books one-by-one, while other solutions have more of a checklist approach, drawing from Amazon exlusively and based on Amazon's ISBN-clone ASIN, and preventing users from editing the bibliographic data.

LibraryThing, by contrast, uses hundreds of other sources, mostly libraries, including many from outside of Amazon's four languages and even in other scripts, and does not rely on an ISBN checklist. Instead, each book in each member's catalog is its own beast, with its own editable data.

The ISBN issue is important to our members, about 25% of whose books lack an ISBN. This is probably both a symptom and a cause of a demographic difference between LT and its competitors; GR and S skew young; young people have fewer non-ISBN books.

Unfortunately, it's not just the lack of an ISBN, for even if two books share something like an LCCN, the libraries will have cataloged them differently, and these differences are important to our members. They want their Deweys and LCCs, their Swedish descriptions and headings, and so forth.

The difference makes it hard to trade data. The problem isn't just the lack of an automated way. People already manually synch across the three systems, all of which offer import and export functionality (unlike the Facebook aps, btw). Unfortunately, all systems work exclusively by ISBN. This means that moving from G or S to LT works fine; as long as you select Amazon as your source the data should be identical. But moving from LibraryThing doesn't work as well, because GR and Shelfari can't parse books without an ISBN, and, when an ISBN is present, data differences introduced by users or coming from a non-Amazon source are erased.

Unfortunately, the issue reflects real differences between the sites and would be hard to overcome. The incentive for GR or S to improve their bibliographic tools is slight. Apart from the steep learning curve--we just spent 6 months revamping our library-data solution and library data is a core strength of our team--their current users do not demand it, those people mostly having chosen LT in the first place. Further, moving from a checklist to a full system is like upgrading from a goldfish to a blue whale. LibraryThing has about 2.5 million unique ISBNs, but almost 22 million books cataloged. We're all having problems scaling fast enough. I doubt that expanding the central database structrue by ten-fold is very appealing.

Comments on Book Patrol: Goodreads Rising as the Year Ends in the Book Soci...

Thanks for the interesting analysis. Apart from th...