Dear winways,
Welcome to the May 2015 State of the Thing! This month, we've got a handful of new features (mostly for your catalog), our Edible Books Contest winners, and a couple of new Legacy Libraries projects in the works.
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We're on Tumblr!
Introducing the official LibraryThing Tumblr! It's a bit of an experiment, and we're still just getting started, but you should come check us out. We'll be posting general readers' interest, book news, interviews, literary quotes, and more.
Group Read: The Night Watch
After a long hiatus, we're finally bringing back our site-wide group read, One LibraryThing, One Book.
In honor of LGBT Pride Month, our June-July pick is Sarah Waters's The Night Watch. Official discussion will kick off Monday, June 1st at 12pm Eastern, at which point we'll only be covering the 1947 section (chapters 1-3) of the book. We're doing things a little differently this time, and breaking the book up into more manageable chunks.
Interested in joining in on the fun? Introduce yourself to your fellow readers on this thread, and be sure to stay tuned to the One LibraryThing, One Book group on Talk for updates!
If you're unfamiliar with One LibraryThing, One Book, be sure to check out the blog post that started it all.
Advanced Search for Your Books
Your Books search got a revamp a few months ago, and now we've rounded out the feature with a more visual system for doing advanced searches. You can still type out searches like "tag:fiction AND author:christie", and now you can use a set of drop-down menus to set up more complex searches like this one. Check out our blog post for full details!
From the Your Books page, click the arrow next to "Search" in the upper right corner (not Site Search—below that!), then select "Advance Search" from the menu that appears. This will take you to the Advanced Search box, which features a series of drop-down menus allowing you to select which fields you'd like to search and for what terms.
Test it out for yourself, and tell us what you think on Talk!
BEA 2015
Next week, I'm headed off to the opposite coast for Book Expo America in New York. If you see me around, say hi! I'll be at BEA Thursday and Friday, May 28-29, and wearing my big "LibraryThing" button.
ALA Annual Conference
Headed to San Francisco for the American Library Association's Annual Conference next month? So are we! And we're really pumped to be announcing an exciting new product while we're there. Be sure to stop by Booth #3634 to say hello and check it out!
Free Books: Early Reviewers
You are not currently signed up for LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. You are missing out!
Early Reviewers offers free books to members—about 100 titles a month! Since 2007, we've given out over 160,000 books. The catch? Publishes want your honest review. How you review a book won't help or hurt your chances of winning books in the future, but not reviewing your winning will.
» Sign up for Early Reviewers
The May batch of Early Reviewers books contains 2,365 copies of 89 different titles. The deadline to request a free book is Monday, May 25th at 6pm, Eastern. Look for the June batch around the 1st.
The most requested books so far from the May batch:
More free books: Member Giveaways
At any given time, there are hundreds of books available from our Member Giveaways program. It's like Early Reviewers, but isn't limited to select publishers—any author or member can post books. Request books, or offer your own!
Hot titles this month
- The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
- The Martian by Andy Weir
- The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
- The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
- The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
- We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
- Hollow City by Ransom Riggs
- Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline
That's it for this month! I'll see you all in June.
Questions, comments, ideas? Send them my way.
—Loranne (loranne@librarything.com)
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