Dear winways,
Welcome to the November 2016 State of the Thing! As promised, SantaThing is here at last! Plus we've got an update on what our developers have been working on lately.
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It's that time of year again, when the LibraryThing elves send books (via eight tiny ponies) far and wide to readers across the globe! SantaThing is our annual is "Secret Santa" program for book lovers. You pay into the system, and you get books, picked just for you by another LT member, in return. While your Secret Santa chooses gifts for you, you get to pick books—in secret!—for another Santa, too.
»Go sign up now!
SantaThing signups are now open, and will close on Sunday, Dec. 4th, at 5pm Eastern. Elves will do the matching of Santas overnight, and you'll be able to start picking gifts the following morning. Books must be chosen no later than the end of that week: Monday, Dec. 12th at 9am Eastern. For details, see our blog post, and come join the discussion on Talk.
Want to participate, but it's not in the budget this year? Help suggest books for other "Santees" by leaving comments on their SantaThing profiles here. We also have an annual SantaThing Donations Thread*.
* A HUGE "Thank you!" to our generous donors, and to LT member ladylenneth for managing the Donations Thread for the fourth year running!
Bug-Whacking Wednesdays
As you may have read in last month's newsletter, with the advent of Syndetics Unbound, we're happy to have more time to devote to development on LibraryThing.com now. Part of that includes addressing existing issues and bugs. To that end, we're dedicating one day every week to this effort—Bug-Whacking Wednesdays. To keep members in the loop, staff will be sharing what they're working on in a dedicated Talk topic, like last week's, here. Stay tuned to the Talk About LibraryThing group for more Wednesday updates! Total bugs are down 10% since we started just two weeks ago—that's over 100 bugs!
Talk of the Thing
Audiobooks for Road Trips. A good audiobook can make or break a book-lover's road trip. Whether you're looking for recommendations yourself, or have a few favorites to share, we'd love to hear from you on Talk.
Welcome, BookBalloon-ers! The forum BookBalloon—a reading life and books discussion site—recently migrated over to LibraryThing. We're very happy to have them and they've got quite a lively group going. While the group is mostly former BookBalloon members, all are welcome! Stop by and say hello.
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? Publishers 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 November batch of Early Reviewers books contains 3,082 copies of 95 different titles. The deadline to request a free book is Monday, November 28th at 6pm, Eastern. Look for the December batch around the 5th.
The most requested books so far from the November batch:
Syndetics Unbound
If you're in the library business, or know folks who are, check out Syndetics Unbound, a unified enrichment service co-developed by LibraryThing and ProQuest. See our blog post for more details.
Sign up for a live webinar to learn about Syndetics Unbound, Book Display Widgets, and LibraryThing for Libraries—held every Tuesday. On this WebEx page, search "Unbound" to find a scheduled webinar.
TinyCat Webinars
Check out TinyCat, the online catalog for "tiny" libraries, at our free, weekly Wednesday webinars. Due to the holidays, we won't be hosting a webinar this week, but you can join us for the next one: Wednesday, December 7th, at 1pm Eastern (US). Head over to this link at that time, and look for the TinyCat Webinar.
If Wednesday at 1pm doesn't work for you, let us know—we'll be happy to schedule a session for you.
We're here to answer your TinyCat questions via email at any time: tinycat@librarything.com. Stay tuned to our Facebook and Twitter pages for more announcements, or see a recorded webinar from July on our YouTube Channel.
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
- Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by Jack Thorne, John Tiffany, and J.K. Rowling
- A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
- A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
- Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard
- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
- The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
- Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
- Uprooted by Naomi Novik
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
That's it for this month. I'll see you all in December!
Questions, comments, ideas? Send them my way.
—Loranne (loranne@librarything.com)
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