Category Archives: News

Re-thinking Open Library’s Book Pages

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by Mek Karpeles, Tabish Shaikh

We’ve redesigned our Book Pages: Before →After.
Please share your feedback with us.

A web page for every book… This is the mission of Open Library: a free, inclusive, online digital library catalog which helps readers find information about any book ever published.

Millions of books in Open Library’s catalog have been made available to preview, read, or borrow using the Internet Archive’s controlled digital lending library. However, the catalog also features tens of millions of books which are yet to have previews and instead serve as resources that help patrons learn more about books, share lists of books they love, keep track of what they’re reading, and locate copies from bookstores and local libraries.

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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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Share what you’re reading

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To bring in the new year, Open Library announced a new feature called the Reading Log which lets you keep track of the books you’re currently reading, have finished reading, or want to read. Over the last two months since we launched the feature, we’ve received promising feedback from our community. Our reading log stats page shows over 53,000 readers have logged more than 100,000 books! It’s even helped us learn which books our community cares most about. The biggest point of feedback we’ve received is that many readers wish there was a way to share their reading log with friends.

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A Holiday Gift from Open Library: Introducing the Reading Log

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For years readers have been asking us for a convenient way to keep track of the books they’re reading.

As we prepare to step through the threshold into 2018, we’re happy to announce the release of a brand new Reading Log feature which lets you indicate all the books you’d like to read, books you’ve already read, and books you’re currently reading.

You can now mark a book as “Want to Read”, “Currently Reading”, or “Already Read”, in addition to adding it to one of your themed reading lists.

Here’s how it works!

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25,000 emails in three years

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25,000

A slightly more personal note here… it’s been a little over three years since I started working at Open Library and just this past week we hit a milestone of 25,000 emails sent. That’s slightly lower than the number of emails we get because some are just saying “Thank you!” and some we forward to other departments and yes, a few are spam. But the rest–the tech support, the early book returns, the reference questions, the merge requests–have been answered by me and Michelle and Laurel.

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