Tag Archives: features

Here you can read blog posts about Open Library features that make it easier to browse or checkout books or navigate our catalog.

Image of Mississauga cityscape near sunset

Search Is Getting Smarter on Open Library

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Image of Mississauga cityscape near sunset. Photo credit: Bart Brewinski

Dear readers,

I sit here, cosily on a cold winter’s night looking out over the Mississauga cityscape, thinking about the important mission we planned for and set out to accomplish almost a year ago: Empowering you, dear readers, to better search for and discover books on Open Library.

For too many years now you’ve been limited in how books can be found from Open Library’s extensive catalogue. Since the dawn of its existence, Open Library’s goal has been to make one web page for every book ever published. And to make those books accessible! But one problem with having millions and millions of book records, is that finding just the book you need can be difficult. Search is your gateway. Your one way to find what you’re looking for. But what if search can’t get you what you need?

Well for many readers, it was impossible to find what they were looking for. The search experience was plagued with limitations. It was impossible to find books in a certain language, or from a certain publisher. Sometimes, your search queries would even return no results at all — even for books actually in the library!

This past week I’ve been busy rolling out our improved search experience as the default across the site. Here are the previously impossible searches that are now possible!

Find borrowable or readable books in a specific language. Previously, the results wouldn’t guarantee that a borrowable or readable edition of the search result was in the specified language. Now you can! For example, for any fellow readers who are trying to learn German, you can now easily find Borrowable or Readable books in German ! Or… how about Spanish? Japanese? Polish? Take your pick!

Search results now prefer editions matching your language. If you have Open Library’s language set to French and you search for “harry potter”, you will see the French cover and title of Harry Potter first. Try it!

Combinations of edition query fields. Now, queries can filter on edition data as well as work data. All these queries used to be impossible on Open Library:

Search results now show the edition that best matches your query. Now, if you search for “one hundred years of solitude”, because your query is in English (regardless of your display language), the English title One Hundred Years of Solitude will be displayed instead of the original Spanish title, Cien años de soledad. Try it! Previously, searching for “one hundred years of solitude” wouldn’t match the correct book at all!

And for any developers out there, these features are also available via the Search API. You just need to add `editions` to the `fields` parameter to get back a new editions subfield with matching edition data.

Search is a behemoth, and there’s always more to do! Here are some of the tweaks and improvements we have lined up to improve upon this work:

These changes required an overhaul of our core Solr-based search infrastructure to make search results edition-aware. But now that this information is in our search engine, we just need to add it to more and more places. These are features that readers have long desired for searching Open Library. And now, their expectations are reality! Open Library just got a little easier to use, and a little more accessible and inclusive.

Happy Reading!

Drini (with some generous writing support and photography from Bart Brewinski)

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.

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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Amplifying the Voices Behind Books With the Power of Data

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Exploring how Open Library uses author data to help readers move from imagination to impact

By Nick Norman, Edited by Mek & Drini

Image Source: Pexels / Pixabay from popsugar

According to René Descartes, a creative mathematician, “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest [people] of past centuries.” If that’s true, then who are some of the people you’re talking to?

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