Relaunch is complete!

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Hello! Just wanted to let you know that we’ve just begun the process of launching our redesigned Open Library site. This may mean that there are a few hiccups along the way, but we hope to be through the woods as soon as possible.

We’ll post back here as soon as it’s stable, and in the meantime, If you spot anything obviously broken or weird, please leave us a comment.

Update, 6:56PM: OK. It’s been about 3 hours since we flipped the switch, and the new site seems to be holding together. Yay! We’ll be posting more about the redesign over the coming days – there are a ton of changes we’d like to highlight specifically, like the fact that we’ve shifted to using CC0 for any edits made to the records on Open Library.

Please be aware there are a few features which have been put on ice temporarily  – full text search and managing the site in multiple languages for example. We want to devote proper attention to improving those features as soon as we can. They will return!

More to come…

Open Library URLs are changing

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We are in the process of upgrading the openlibrary.org website to include the new functionality.

As part of this upgrade, the URLs of the openlibrary.org website will change from /a/, /b/, /l/ and /user/ to /authors/, /books/, /languages/ and /people/ respectively. After this change, the old URLs will get redirected to the new ones.

We are not anticipating any downtime during this process. However, there could be momentary failures in loading some pages.

We’ll post here once the change is over.

Open Library Ore

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Ben Gimpert - click to visit Ben's websiteBen Gimpert is a friend of the Open Library. He and I got together over lunch a few months ago to talk about big data, statistical natural language processing, and extracting meaning from Open Library programmatically. His efforts are beginning to bear some really interesting fruit, and while we work out how we might be able to present it online, we thought you might be interested to hear what he’s been up to…

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Thumbnail View in BookReader!

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We’re pleased to introduce a new thumbnail view for the Internet Archive BookReader. The thumbnail view gives you a quick visual impression of a book by seeing thumbnails of many pages at once. It’s a great way to quickly scan through a book.

Here’s how it looks for a book about the painter Goya:

The thumbnail view also makes it easy to pick out particular pages of interest, for example if you were trying to find the Burrowing Owl in Bird life in an Arctic Spring. Hint: here’s what he looks like:

You might also try looking at Old English colour prints or some of the other books about color prints.

This feature was submitted by Stephanie Collett of the California Digital Library via our BookReader GitHub account. It’s great to have this feature come in from the open source community building around the BookReader!