Category Archives: Librarianship

Introducing Trusted Book Providers

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Building the Internet’s library is no easy task, and it can’t be done alone. Thankfully, we’re not alone in wanting to provide access to knowledge, books, and reading — which is why we’re excited to introduce Trusted Book Providers into Open Library. This feature allows us to provide direct “Read” links to a number of carefully selected, reputable sources of books online. Integrations with Project Gutenberg and LibriVox are up and running, and integrations with Standard Ebooks, OpenStax, and Wikisource are in progress. By linking to these outstanding organizations, we’re excited to help promote their wonderful work as well as give Open Library patrons easy access to more trusted sources for digital books. We see this as a step in helping the world of open access books flourish.

Viewing LibriVox and Gutenberg works in Open Library

For more than ten years, Open Library has allowed patrons from across the globe to read, borrow, and listen to digital books from the Internet Archive’s prodigious lending library and public domain collection. Since then, the Internet Archive has partnered closely with more than 1,000 US libraries to accession books, ensure their digital preservation, and make them useful to select audiences, such as those with print disabilities, through controlled library practices.

Open Library is now excited to expand its “Read” buttons to include not only the millions of books made available by the Internet Archive, but also works from other trusted digital collections. What does this mean for patrons? It means more books and more reading options — such as LibriVox’s human-read public domain audiobooks, Standard Ebooks’ lovingly formatted modern epubs, or Project Gutenberg’s reflowable-text books. We hope this will result in a more inclusive ecosystem and shine more light on the amazing work done by these other mission-aligned non-profit organizations.

Choosing the First Trusted Book Providers

We selected the first group of Trusted Book Providers based on several factors. First, we prioritized non-profit organizations who are reputable, well-established, and have a similar focus on serving public good. Second, we looked for providers whose holdings increased the diversity of book formats Open Library may link to. Thirdly, we looked for providers who focus on open & permissive licensing, or public domain material.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the oldest digital library online. Founded in 1971 (was the internet even around then?), the volunteer-driven organization is dedicated to creating free, open, long-lasting eBooks that are easily accessible from many devices. The Internet Archive already proudly preserves most of Project Gutenberg’s over 60,000 titles, and Open Library is excited to be able to have users read from Project Gutenberg directly. For patrons, the human-curated, reflowable-text formats made available by Project Gutenberg are ideal for reading on small screens, e-readers, and also for powerful accessibility customization, like dyslexic fonts and screen readers.

Browse on Open Library

LibriVox

Founded in 2005, LibriVox’s stated mission is “to make all books in the public domain available, narrated by real people and distributed for free, in audio format on the internet.” And with over 15,000 editions in over 80 languages, they’re making great headway! The Internet Archive also works with LibriVox, and provides storage for their mass of audio files. For patrons, LibriVox integration means they will now have access to human-spoken audiobooks for many public domain works.

Browse on Open Library

Standard Ebooks

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project dedicated to producing new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of copyright restrictions, and free of cost. Founded in 2015, Standard Ebooks books are carefully standardized and normalized to work great as reflowable-text html, as well as modern epubs with all the trimmings — table of contents, typographical attention to detail, beautiful public domain cover art, and more. For patrons, Standard Ebooks’ over 500 titles are perfect for reading on web browsers, phones, or e-readers due to their reflowable text and modern epub features specifically optimized for every e-reader platform.

In Progress… | Browse at Standard Ebooks

OpenStax

OpenStax is a non-profit dedicated to creating original, free, open-access high school and college textbooks. Part of the non-profit corporation, Rice University, OpenStax has created over 60 high quality, peer-reviewed textbooks since its launch in 2012, with some titles available in English, Spanish, and Polish. Open Library will include OpenStax read links so our patrons can find and access these digital-only materials online or as PDF or ePub downloads.

In Progress… | Browse at OpenStax

Wikisource

Launched in 2003, Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation (the folks who run Wikipedia). Wikisource has a huge community of editors dedicated to converting scans of classic books to error-free, proofread digital books. And improving their records is as easy as editing a Wikipedia page! Offering reading options online or offline as PDF, ePub, mobi, etc for millions of records, Wikisource’s catalog, spanning over 30 languages, is unparalleled. And soon, you’ll be able to find these works right in Open Library!

In Progress… | Browse at Wikisource

How Trusted Book Providers Work

As a patron, you shouldn’t have to do anything special to access titles from our Trusted Partners.

When designing support for Trusted Providers, we wanted to find the right balance between convenience and trust. We didn’t want patrons to get confused by a button taking them to a new website without warning. But we also didn’t want to introduce unnecessary friction and multiple clicks preventing patrons from easily accessing books. As a result, our team team converged on two strategies:

  1. When a Read button is for a Trusted Provider, the button will have an external link icon like:
  2. When you click a Trusted Provider button, a message will appear on Open Library providing context about the Trusted Provider. The Trusted Provider link will be open within a new browser tab.

Recommend a Trusted Book Provider

Are you a book service, library, or publisher which would like to integrate with the Open Library’s catalog? Or is there a service you’d like to recommend?

Please recommend or apply to become a Trusted Book Provider using this form.

Introducing: Community Reviews

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You can now publicly review books using structured book #tags on Open Library with Community Reviews. Take a look, try it out, and send us feedback!

Many social book websites including Goodreads & LibraryThing feature text reviews from the community. Why hasn’t Open Library?

As a non-profit library service with a small staff, there are three reasons we’ve resisted the urge to add text reviews to Open Library. First and foremost, we feel strongly about preserving Open Library as an inclusive, safe, neutral place where readers can trust the information they receive. Some opinionated reviews, even though valid, may contend with this goal. Secondly, we’re cautious about adding features which may require a large time investment to moderate well. We’d rather spend our time making it easier for people across the globe to find books in their native languages than sink all of our time reviewing spam. Finally, there are indeed already several websites which feature text reviews. We’re excited to link patrons to these resources and think our time may be better served exploring new ways of adding unique value back to the book ecosystem.

This all said, reviews are one of the most requested features by book lovers on Open Library and we feel its important readers to have their voices heard. So what are our options?

A review of reviews

One super-power of text reviews is that they are unstructured. Their open-ended format allows reviewers to express very nuanced and deep thoughts like, how impressively the male author Arthur Golden was able to portray the emotional turmoil of the female characters portrayed in Memoirs of A Geisha. This super-power does come with a trade-off. It can be challenging to compare reviews and know which should be trusted; two reviews may have completely diverging styles or focus. One reviewer may be reacting to the story line while another may be critiquing the book’s pace. Reviews are often not easily digestible. A lot of information is lost when one tries to compress a review into a single star rating. Because of these challenges with “digestibility”, it’s also challenging to summarize text reviews as data which may be used to help people discover new books. Amazon has some techniques which we considered:

A collaborative approach

How can Open Library empower readers to share their impressions about books in a new way, facilitate useful reviews which are structured and easily digestible, while maintaining a safe and neutral library landscape?

Open Library’s collaborative approach, which we’re calling Community Reviews, borrows from an old (now defunct) project called BookLamp and a more recent project called StoryGraph, which let participants use tags to vote on & review various aspects of books like pace, genre, mood, and more:

StoryGraph crowd sources tags like genre and mood from the community and use this information to help readers find the right book for them
BookLamp used a hybrid of robots and crowd sourcing to identify themes and topics within books.

The more participants who vote using review tags, the more accurate and meaningful the review becomes for the community. Instead of sifting through dozens of text reviews, Community Reviews gives readers a birds-eye view across many publicly listed dimensions they might care about like Pace, Enjoyability, Clarity, Difficulty, Breadth, Genre, Mood, Impressions, Length, Credibility, Text Features, Content Warnings, Terminology, and Purpose.

Here’s what Open Library Community Reviews looks like:

By clicking “+ Add your community review”, any logged in reader may submit their own public, anonymous reviews:

Building Together

Community Reviews features a public schema which anyone may reference or propose changes to. It’s a work in progress and will undoubtedly need the community’s feedback to become useful over time.

Feedback

Community Reviews is a beta work in progress and we expect it to change drastically over the coming weeks based on feedback from our community. We also anticipate issues and bugs may emerge — you can help by reporting bugs and issues here.

We do have every intention for Community Reviews to be included (in an anonymized form) in our public monthly data dumps for the benefit of our community and via our APIs, though this may take some time to implement.

As the number of Community Reviews increases, our plan is to include them in our search engine so you have ever more ways to identify the best books for you.

We know many patrons would still love to see text reviews on Open Library and that Community Reviews isn’t a replacement for every use case. We sincerely appreciate this and still, we hope that readers will find this new feature valuable and provide us with feedback to improve it over time.

Thanks

We’d like to sincerely thank Jim Champ who recently joined as staff member on Open Library and whose leadership was indispensable in bringing this feature to life. Thank you to you Drini Cami, also staff at Open Library, for his contributions to improving the user experience. If you hate the idea or execution, blame Mek but do give us feedback to improve.

An old brass key dropped on the ground in the woods.

Open Library Tags Explained—for Readers Seeking Buried Treasure

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As part of an open-source project, the Open Library blog has a growing number of contributors: from librarians and developers to designers, researchers, and book lovers. Each contributor writes from their perspective, sharing contributions they’re making to the Open Library catalog. As such, the Open Library blog has a versatile tagging system to help patrons navigate such a diverse and wide range of content.

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Library Explorer at Library Leaders Forum

Introducing the Open Library Explorer

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Try it here! If you like it, share it.

Bringing 100 Years of Librarian-Knowledge to Life

By Nick Norman with Drini Cami & Mek

At the Library Leaders Forum 2020 (demo), Open Library unveiled the beta for what it’s calling the Library Explorer: an immersive interface which powerfully recreates and enhances the experience of navigating a physical library. If the tagline doesn’t grab your attention, wait until you see it in action:

Drini showcasing Library Explorer at the Library Leaders Forum
Get Ready to Explore

In this article, we’ll give you a tour of the Open Library Explorer and teach you how one may take full advantage of its features. You’ll also get a crash course on the 100+ years of library history which led to its innovation and an opportunity to test-drive it for yourself. So let’s get started!  

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