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.
Search Full-Text within 4M+ Books
Open Library now lets you search inside the text contents of over 4M books!
A Full-Text Search for “thanks for all the fish” on openlibrary.org
Star Ratings are Here!
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.
Turn Your Website into a Library
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.
Share what you’re reading
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.