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.

Reading lending library books on the Nook

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Our lending library books now work on the Nook!

If you can read online, try the ‘Read In Browser’ link on a borrowable book. This is simplest!  Otherwise, you’ll need a computer, with Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed.

Once you have ADE, here’s how to use it with your Nook:

  • Quit Digital Editions, if it’s running
  • Plug in the Nook, and start ADE
  • ADE should recognize the Nook, and offer to associate with it. Make sure you can see the Nook under ‘Bookshelves’ on the left. Ok!
  • Go to the borrow page and borrow a book in pdf or epub format.
  • If ADE is working properly, you should see your book!
  • Next, go to ‘Library View’ in ADE – in the upper left.
  • In the Library View, drag your new book over to the Nook icon under ‘Bookshelves.’
  • Quit ADE and eject your Nook.

To read on the Nook:

  • Go to your Library (on a Nook Color, do this by touching the bottom of the touchscreen)
  • Go to ‘my files’ – at the top – and open ‘Digital Editions’
  • Open your book! (if it says ‘sorry, can’t open this book’, try again.)

To return your book early so that others can borrow it:

  • Quit ADE if it’s running
  • Plug in your Nook and start ADE
  • Open ‘Library View’ and click ‘All Items’ on the left
  • On your book icon, there’s a drop down menu (a little triangle) in the upper left – select ‘Return Borrowed Item’
  • Open the Nook, in the bookshelf area on the left.
  • On your book icon – select ‘Return Borrowed Item’.
  • Your book should now be available to borrow again!

If you run into trouble, here’s a forum on the Barnes and Noble site about how to get ADE working with the Nook.

BookReader Work Sprint at NYPL Labs

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We had a really fantastic code/work sprint for the BookReader organized by the most excellent NYPL Labs.  The sprint was designed to bring together organizations that have an interest in the BookReader as a way to foster the sharing of interest, code and expertise.

New York Public Library

We started by making a list of desired features and prioritizing them.  High on the list was to make the code more modular and easier to understand, reuse and extend.  We made great progress towards that goal by creating a new plugin architecture that allows new views of the book to be added cleanly to the existing code.  For example, it will be possible to create a book view that uses the <canvas> tag or other advanced web technologies and have it automatically included in the BookReader application simply by including that plugin’s JavaScript file.

Looking down into the stacks

Another highly desired feature is making it easier for people to use their own books with the BookReader application.  Doug Reside from NYPL Labs contributed a “book loader” (our new term for the piece of code that connects the BookReader to the underlying images and metadata for a book to display) that allows you to specify the images for a book directly inside an HTML file.  This new loader provides a simple way to use the BookReader for your own books.

The new code is currently on the codesprint branch of the BookReader github repository.  We plan to integrate the new plugin system once the code has been polished and tested. Updated documentation is also coming. You can subscribe to the bookreader-announce mailing list to be notified when the code is released. You can also find more information about developing and using the BookReader in our developer resources.

Mitch Brodsky with his BookReader customized for the NY Philharmonic

This works sprint hosted by NYPL Labs marks an exciting new milestone in the development of the BookReader. We’re setting the foundation for greater re-use and collaboration around the BookReader. Many thanks to Doug Reside, David Riordan and Ben Vershbow of NYPL Labs for organizing the sprint and the fantastic attendees who contributed ideas and code commits!

BookReader Sprinters

The Little Bot That Could

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homebuying is lots and lots of paperwork

Meet oclcBot. He was written by Bruce Washburn at OCLC Research to help connect Open Library records to Worldcat.org. He’s just finished updating almost 4 million Open Library editions with links! No metadata exchange at all, except these identifiers. Tiny, but powerful, because that lets systems that “speak OCLC” communicate directly with Open Library without knowing any Open Library IDs. As Anand mentioned in his recent post about Coverstore Improvements, we’ve also made the system for displaying covers externally using other types of identifiers more efficient.

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pystatsd & 5,000 Lists!

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We’re working hard to improve Open Library’s general stability and performance, after a few harrowing weeks moving our hardware infrastructure around. We’re beginning to measure more stuff across the site, from general activity levels (about 40,000 catalog edits every month!) to quite specific actions (like, seeing that every second, 1-3 people open up our BookReader).

We’ve begun using a super awesome, real-time stats processing package called pystatsd, a Python implementation of Etsy’s statsd server. My favourite bit is a program that sits on top of that called graphite which takes all the stats we collect with pystatsd and renders them as graphs in a browser. Suddenly, we can see the system in a new and useful way.

We’re also looking hard at improving our memcached configuration, recently introducing another 4 memcached machines into our pool. Now that we can measure memcached hits and misses using pystatsd and graphite, we’ll be able to tell when our caching stuff is actually improving. Yay!

Memcached hits & misses

Another tweak you might find interesting… it used to be that lists would only show up on the main Lists page if they contained at least 3 seeds. The other day, Raj and I upped that to at least 5 seeds, and that immediately produced a selection of arguably more interesting lists, most of which settle around a subject area. Here’s a small selection:

Have you made a great list, or found someone else’s? Let us know in the comments!