30/05/06
Librarything
Sigh. AbeBooks has bought a 40% stake in Librarything. Press Release.
Why the sigh? Well, really, because I wanted it.
Librarything (LT) is a website that allows visitors to catalogue their book collections, ‘tag’ books in their collection, and then see how their collection relates to others’ with the same books and tags. As such it is at the same time a ‘recommendation engine’ and the basis for a ’social networking’ book site.
To date it has remained pretty small, 35k unique users, but the potential of the community is what makes it attractive. The technology itself is easy enough to mimic, but the user base is fanatical, and evangelical, about the site, and each other. Its independence has clearly helped it gain this trust - and that trust is at the core of a successful community site. You couldn’t just recreate it and hope to do the same again.
In my opinion, LT is focused enough and large enough to provide the basis for the ‘myspace for books’; and the recommendation engine is potentially a brilliant way to drive ‘long tail’ sales. As it is all about word of mouth - albeit electronically - it therefore represents a couple of book marketing holy grails.
Like myspace, the financial model in and of itself is unclear at the moment, but if you combined it with something like amazon fulfiling the long tail recommendations, and extended the (subscription paying) audience, it becomes clearer.
# Traffic
In the absence of firm stats, here’s librarything’s traffic over the past 12 months
http://www.alexaholic.com/librarything.com?y=r&r=1y&z=1
# Users (early May)
Books cataloged 2,547,827
Total users 35,919 (since August 29, 2005)
Unique works 766,841
Total tags 3,737,685
Total reviews 32,331
Total ratings 328,574
User-contributed covers 63,912
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# Comment by Tim @ 7:21 pm, May 30, 2006:
Hey, thanks for blogging about LibraryThing. I think you’re dead right. Now who are you?!
# Pingback by Times emit» Blog Archive » Wall Street Journal on LibraryThing @ 8:14 am, June 27, 2006:
[…] It’s a puff piece, but a pretty detailed one which will no doubt bring LT to the broader attention of readers, and probably the publishers who really should be looking at this as a great idea for how to pursue the ‘long tail’ as well as ‘word of mouth’ - the two holy grails of bookselling I have mentioned in the same breath as LT here before. […]
# Pingback by Times emit » Blog Archive » The Long Tail @ 3:29 pm, July 20, 2006:
[…] The book also mentions Google as the Long Tail of advertising - which is of course true: Adwords is connecting advertisers to consumers and getting paid to do so. Additionally, I’ve blogged before now about LibraryThing and how that is in some ways a potentially marvellous articulation of Long Tail economics mixed with word of mouth, although clearly LibraryThing is not yet operating on those levels as a business, depending on subscriptions rather than cuts on individual sales. But now that Abe has taken a stake, who knows? Second hand book sales, and aggregated ones at that, are classic Long Tail markets, and the book highlights Alibris. […]