Library Stuff

“This evening, Facebook is launching its new App Center to help its 901 million members discover high quality social apps for the web and mobile. Goodreads is one of the apps participating in the launch event, and the new App Center will serve as another way for people to discover our app.

What makes the Goodreads team particularly proud is that the Facebook App Center only lists high quality apps that rate well on key signals such as highest customer ratings and frequency of user shares. The Goodreads App, with an average 4.5 star rating (out of 5) is clearly winning many fans.”

via Goodreads

LifeHacker – “Sorting through the Amazon store for free ebooks can be a bit of a mess. To simplify the process Zero Dollar Books is a simple webapp that aggregates all the best selling free ebooks and shows them off in a nice clean view.”

Goodreads Blog – “Goodreads continues to grow at a phenomenal pace. Today, we had our 300 millionth book cataloged! To give this statistic some context: It took the Goodreads community three years to catalog 100 million books (including books marked as read, to-read, or currently reading). Fourteen months later, in late September 2011, we reached 200 million books. Now, just seven months after that, we’ve hit the 300 million benchmark. Take a look at how the number of books cataloged has skyrocketed.”

LA Times – “The Book Depository is a British-based online bookseller that ships to countries around the world, for free. To bring that point home, it has built a map that shows who bought what, where, just now. The window of the map moves to reach the most recent purchase, zooming back and forth from Germany to Singapore to the United States to Australia to Norway. In each location, the title pops up. It’s hypnotic.”

Lifehacker – “Got a lot of books crowding your home or feel buried under paper clutter, without the time or the equipment to scan everything? 1DollarScan is a service that will digitize it all for you starting at just $1. For a buck, you can get a 100 book pages, 10 business cards, 10 photos, 10 business document pages, or 1 greeting card converted to PDF and available for download or on DVD. You can make your eBooks or other digital docs searchable by adding OCR for another buck.”

Galley Cat – “Trying to remember a book you read as a child? Need help finding the title of a short story you loved in college? Post your query on the Tip of My Tongue page at Reddit–hundreds of dedicated readers will help you find the book.”

Webjunction – “Last summer we reported the results of our survey of WebJunction members about their use of 10 types of online tools and resources. This spring we surveyed our membership again with a similar question, but this time separating professional use from personal use. We also updated the tool list, adding mobile apps, chat and IM, video- and photo-sharing sites, online games, and discussion forums. This year, we had 1,039 responses, in contrast to the ~575 last year. But the makeup of the respondents are similar: 70% are from public libraries, and all have registered as WebJunction members.”

Lifehacker – “Android: Our favorite book recommendations site, Goodreads, now lets you discover and share books on the go from your Android device. Goodreads was the winner of our Hive Five for best book recommendation services, but at the time this giant book lovers’ community was only web-based.”

SF Chronicle – “A woman walks into the Berkeley Tool Lending Library with a small baby cradled in one arm and a sledgehammer in the other. It’s an unusual sight for a newcomer, but Robert Young and Angel Entes don’t even raise an eyebrow from behind the checkout desk.”

Press Release – “A new firearms research database launched by the Harvard School of Public Health makes scholarly articles more accessible to reporters, law enforcement, public health officials, policymakers, and the general public. The Firearms Research Digest (www.firearmsresearch.org) provides summaries of articles gathered from social science, criminology, medical and public health journals and is written in clear, accessible language for use by those outside academia. The website currently covers six years of research published between 2003 and 2008. The digest will be expanded over time to include articles from 1988 to the present.”