Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

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Visit Library Thing, originally added to eHub on Sep 10, 05.

eHub Interviews LibraryThing

Thanks to Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing for this email interview posted October 28, 2005.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

LibraryThing: LibraryThing allows you to catalog your books online, drawing on Amazon and over 30 libraries around the world. While you catalog you can also tag your books, prompting some to call it “Flickr for books.” You can also browse other people’s collections (if they choose to make them public) and the application helps you discover libraries like yours, prompting some to call it “Friendster for books.” These comparisons give it a Web 2.0 feel but the joy of cataloging and of connecting with another reader of some obscure book is literally ancient.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

LibraryThing: I’d been thinking about it for a few years. I’m the sort of person who cataloged his books in Filemaker before the web. When I’m at a party I gravitate to my hosts’ bookshelves, and I like it when people look at mine. LibraryThing struck me as an obvious idea.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth? Do you have a day job?

LibraryThing: I am a freelance web publisher and web developer, so my attention is flexible. It took about a month of initial development, and I have been working on it almost constantly since it debuted on August 29.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

LibraryThing: I’m solo. I started programming when my Dad got an Apple II in ‘79 and fooled around with text adventures and bulletin boards most of my childhood. In college I avoided “computer science” entirely and went for Classics and History. I spent college and some time after working for MacTemps (now Aquent), learning every application I could. During the dot-com boom I was off pursuing a PhD in Classics. I eventually dropped out and worked for three years in the Instructional Technology department of a major publisher in Boston. That was when I got serious about web development and programming.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

LibraryThing: There’s a lot to say here, but others have said it better. I am an ardent fan of Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters. Graham did not so much overturn my ideas about computers and software development as validate them--the margins of my copy are full of “yes!” and “damn right!” I read him now for inspiration. I should also mention Jason Fried’s recent talk “Lessons Learned while building Basecamp.” Although I came across it only last week, I agree with most of what he says: building half an application, managing debt, building from the UI, learning from users, keeping it simple, feature food.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

LibraryThing: LibraryThing is built half in Lisp and half in Ruby on Rails, both cleverly disguised as PHP and MySQL.

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

LibraryThing: LibraryThing has been a truly cooperative project. It has an active development blog where I receive suggestions and solicit opinions. I also get a lot of email. I try to react quickly, so the most important suggestions have already been incorporated. For a while my non-English users were screaming that the Library of Congress wasn’t good enough, so I added 30 more libraries to the mix. Power-editing, particularly of tags, and RSS feeds are currently the most requested features.

I think it’s important to apply source criticism to user requests. Power users are very vocal, and their goodwill is important--for one thing, they tend to blog about you--but they aren’t your only users. You don’t get emails from people who visited the site but weren’t excited about it or couldn’t figure it out. The blogosphere can be a useful corrective. Negative comments on a blog are both interesting and very dangerous. When someone blogs about a problem, I jump.

Also on source criticism, I try to correct for when a user is inspired by the trendy technology--tags, social software, AJAX--but isn’t likely to become a user. Being on the “popular” page at Del.icio.us sent me a lot of traffic, and lots of intricate suggestions about “facets,” but few real users. Academics, book-hounds and librarians have been a much more fruitful source of both users and long-term buzz. People don’t tag to tag or network to network.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

LibraryThing: LibraryThing is all over the US, Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand. Others come from countries where English is the second language, like Denmark and Holland; it has yet to be noticed in France and Germany. Recently it “pulled an Orkut,” and filled with Brazilians, who read about it in a major newspaper there. At that point LibraryThing was restricted to the Amazons and the Library of Congress. Since then I have added 30 libraries, paying particular attention to “feature food” for the smaller markets--Dutch, Turkish, Danish, Swedish, even Welsh. It is easier to boil small oceans.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months? The next 2 years?

LibraryThing: I plan to expand into cataloging doorknobs, and I really hope that someone doesn’t beat me to it.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

LibraryThing: Scaling. I built it on the philosophy that bad was the new good, and that the problems of success are good problems to have. Well, 600,000 books later, now would be a nice time to understand database optimization…

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

LibraryThing: Mainstream press--the New York Times, The New Yorker, etc. The blogosphere is a wonderful microcosm, but most of my potential users don’t read blogs.

eHub: Do you have a business model? If so, what is it?

LibraryThing: LibraryThing allows users to catalog up to 200 books for free. After that, you pay $10 for a year’s membership and $25 for a lifetime membership. Most LibraryThing users elect for the lifetime option. There are no ads and associate links are downplayed. I think that charging users will make a Web 2.0 comeback. Adsense is great for content sites, but it gets annoying on web applications. Charging for services makes users into customers. Users are habitual; customers are loyal. Further, when you’re dealing with people’s data, people *want* to pay you. They want to know you’ll have the resources to keep the service up. They want to have some claim on your attention.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

LibraryThing: To be honest, I haven’t looked for a week. I have so much to do, the damn log files are so big, and what would I learn from them? The most important numbers are users--it’s growing nicely--and books--it’s exploding. I periodically check my PubSub mentions. Although partial, these seem like more important metric than impressions or visitors.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

LibraryThing: Although most people don’t “get” the site and would never need it, the book-hound 5% love the site--LOVE IT. Praise has been fulsome and frequently romantic--even erotic. (Check out the buzz page.) I’ve worked on projects that people bought and used, but secretly detested. They were too demoralized to report bugs and you had to pay them to talk about it. Gates is richer, but Jobs is happier.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

LibraryThing: The web continues to figure out what it’s good for. It’s getting better--easier and more transparent. Talk of an epochal shift is mostly hype.

The web is “disappearing” as it matures. Publishing people may discuss where the “publishing industry” is heading, but nobody asks “Where are books heading?” There may be a Web 3.0 conference, but there will not be a Web 9.0 conference. I don’t think our grandchildren will consider it a “thing.” We will not be cool.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

LibraryThing: Apart from sites related to the work (eg., Technorati and the blogs of everyone who mentions my site), I spend most of my time on news sites. I went through a Wikipedia phase and periodically check “my topics.” I monitor but don’t work much on a classics wiki I started (www.ancientlibrary.com/wcd). I listen to most of the IT Conversations podcasts and check up on Jacob Nielsen, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Paul Graham and others sporadically.

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

LibraryThing: Very few. Thank you for your concern.

Thanks to Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing for this email interview posted October 28, 2005.

Visit Library Thing
Originally added to eHub on Sep 10, 05

» More eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

Also see eHub Interviews in Japanese at CNET Japan

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