Author Archives: mek

About mek

Citizen of the World, Open Librarian @ openlibrary.org

Raising Crypto for the Greater Good

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Open Library is raising 50 Ethereum (ETH) to get books our readers love! Chip-in and help us democratize our bookshelves for all.


If you donate now, WeTrust Spring will match your individual ETH donation 100% (until they’ve hit $100k), through Giving Tuesday, Nov. 27!

In 2006, Aaron Swartz founded Open Library with the vision of creating “one web page for every book ever published”. Over the last twelve years, a lot has changed. Open Library has matured not only into a book catalog spanning 25M editions and 16M unique works, but into a library initiative recognized by the state of California, under the auspices of the Internet Archive. Today, Open Library makes over 3M of Internet Archive’s digital books (2.3M public access, 800k modern borrowable) readable directly from your browser. Last year, over 1.3M books were lent to readers from openlibrary.org.

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Google Summer of Code 2018

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This is Internet Archive’s second year participating in Google Summer of Code, but for Open Library, it’s an exciting first. Open Library’s mission is to create, “a web page for every book” and this summer, we’re fortunate to team with Salman Shah to advance this mission. Salman’s Google Summer of Code roadmap aims to targets two core needs of openlibrary.org: modernizing and increasing the coverage of its book catalog and improving website reliability. 

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Star Ratings are Here!

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Over the last six months, more than 145,000 of you have tracked which books you want-to-read. Now you can record how you feel about the books you’ve finished reading using star ratings!

Next time you’re on a book page, you’ll see 5-stars beneath the book cover. By clicking one of the 5 stars, you can select the corresponding rating for this book. Your ratings are private by default, though we do intend to offer an option for making your ratings public. Also, while it’s not finished yet, we are working on adding average star ratings to our books pages so you can learn how the community feels about different titles.

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Turn Your Website into a Library

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Openlibrary.org has over 3M books lining its digital shelves, but nothing quite beats being able to embed your favorite book directly on your personal site. Last week, with the help of volunteer Galen Mancino, we launched an embed tool which lets you add any Open Library book to your website or blog. Next time you write a book review, you can place its Open Library book right next to it and, if its available, enable your audience to read it with a single click.

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