By Nick Norman, Mek, et al

Subscribe to readers with complimentary tastes to receive book recommendations.

Over the past few months, we’ve been rolling out the basic building blocks of the “Follow” feature: a way for readers to follow those with similar tastes and to tap into a personalized feed of book recommendations.

How does the “Follow” feature work?

Similar to following people on platforms like Facebook, Open Library’s “Follow” feature enables patrons to connect with fellow readers whose Reading Logs are set to public. When you follow other readers, their recent public reading activity will show up in your feed and hopefully help you discover interesting books to read next.

You can get to your feed from the My Books page, using the My Feed item in the left navigation menu:

What’s next?

Most of the functionality for following readers is live, but we’re still designing mechanisms for discovering readers to follow. Interested in shaping the development of this new feature? Take a look at these open Github issues relating to the Follow feature.

Your feedback is appreciated

Have other comments or thoughts? Please share them in the comments section below, connect with us on Twitter, and send us your feedback about the new “Follow” feature.

Mek here, program lead for OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive with important updates and a way for library lovers to help protect an Internet that champions library values.

Over the last several months, Open Library readers have felt the devastating impact of more than 500,000 books being removed from the Internet Archive’s lending library, as a result of Hachette v. Internet Archive.

In less than two weeks, on June 28th, the courts will hear the oral argument for the Internet Archive’s appeal.

What’s at stake is the very ability for library patrons to continue borrowing and reading the books the Internet Archive owns, like any other library

Consider signing this open letter to urge publishers to restore access to the 500,000 books they’ve caused to be removed from the Internet Archive’s lending library and let readers read.

Earlier this year, the Internet Archive’s Open Library conducted a brief survey to learn more about patrons’ experiences and preferences when borrowing and reading books. As promised, we’ve anonymized the results and are sharing them with you!

We invite you to watch the presentation or view the slides:

Purpose

The purpose of this survey was to better understand:

1. If, how, & why Open Library patrons download books
2. How patron reading preferences align with our offerings

Survey Setup

For one week, starting on Tuesday 2022-02-07, OpenLibrary.org patrons were invited to participate in a brief survey including 7 questions — one of which was a screener to ensure we only included the responses of patrons who have prior experience using the Open Library.

In total, 2,121 patrons participated in the survey and, after screening, 1,118 were included in the results.

Errata: In the original survey, the question asking patrons “When you DON’T DOWNLOAD the books you’ve borrowed from Open Library, what is your primary reason?”, we mistakingly omitted a “N/A – I Don’t typically download” option and we corrected this on day 1 of the survey.

6 Key Learnings

1. Around half of participants have used adobe content server with DRM to securely download their loaned books
2. Of participants who download their loans, the top reason (54%) is for offline access
3. Of participants who download their loans, a quarter do so because they prefer the EPUB text format to the image-based experience of the online bookreader.
4. Around 42% of participants report difficulty downloading their loans. Of these participants…
   • 69% were unable to locate a download option (or a download option didn’t exist for that book)
   • 31% experienced found a download option but couldn’t get it to work
5. Around half of participants intentionally opt for BookReader for a variety of reasons:
   • Its simplicity & convenience; no app installation required
   • Many teachers can’t download on school computers
   • Many patrons don’t trust downloads, dislike DRM, or want their reader privacy protected
   • Some patrons have limited storage space
6. Around half of participants read for pleasure, the other half for some form of self-learning or research.

What participants said

• ~150 participants shared their praise, thanks, and personal inspirational stories
• ~75 participants offered productive critiques for how we could improve our book finding and book reading experiences
  • Fixing OCR, hiding menu bars while reading, zooming & scrolling, etc
• ~55 participants expressed concerns about “1 hour” lending duration
• Some participants did not like the intrusive, non-dismissable Open Library banner

How we’re responding

1. Open Library created a github issue for allowing patrons to dismiss news banners and we have since implemented this feature to make announcements work better for the community!
2. We heard feedback from the community loud and clear that the implementation of 1-hour loans may not always be ideal for all patrons. The Internet Archive has been exploring and prototyping various tweaks to lending, such as an auto-renewal mechanism, that could extend a loan automatically for a patron if, at the end of the loan period, the book is still actively being read.