BookMooch Blog

As I posted last week, the “newly added books” feature uses Twitter in a big way.

Now that I’ve added some Twitter features to BookMooch, it would be fairly easy for me to add deeper BookMooch/Twitter integration. I have a few ideas.

Help me decide what to do : answer this one question poll.

Mark and the other BookMooch admins have put together a new list of top book topics, and I think it more accurately reflects both what people are looking for, and the books that are available in BookMooch.

These new topics are now in place, and you’ll see lots of new topics that people have asked for (such as “cooking“). They show up in the “browse topics” page, and also on the “recently added by genre” page.

ps: I know that the topics assigned to books aren’t great, but this will be fixed in a bit, when I switch off of using Amazon’s data (sigh, who put “Davinci code” in “cooking”), to use using book data from other sources. I’m hoping that will happen in December.

Here is the new list of book topics:

Action & Adventure
Arts & Photography
Audio Books
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children’s Books
Christianity
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment
Fantasy
Fiction
Gay & Lesbian
Health, Mind & Body
Home & Garden
Horror
Jewish American
Libros en Espanol
Literature & Fiction
Mind & Body
Mystery
Nonfiction
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Families
Religion & Spirituality
Romance
Science Fiction
Short Stories
Sports
Thrillers
Travel
Westerns
Women’s Fiction
World Literature

As in the past two years, professor Karl Fast’s class is studying various aspects of BookMooch, conducting interviews and writing recommendations for changes. I’ve blogged quite a bit about the classes’ previous years’ results, and last year’s report on BookMooch’s culture is fascinating reading (as well as being very helpful for me).

This year, the class has broken down into different groups, each looking at a different aspect of BookMooch. It’s a bit more ambitious (which is great!) and the groups are attacking questions that I think are really important for BookMooch.

• First survey: how you use social networking sites to talk about books and BookMooch.

• Second survey: to find people to interview over Skype.

I’ve added a suite of features that show you books as they’re added to BookMooch. Specifically:

• see all books as they are added to BookMooch (in real time!)

• see books in a specific genre as they are added
• see books available in a specific country as they are added
• only see books which are both in a specific country and a specific genre, as they are added
• see books as they are added by a single member
• use Twitter to subscribe to any of these feeds and monitor them however you like
• use Twitter to search for any combination of countries, users and genres that you like.

You’ll find all these features under the new “recent” button in the “browse” section of BookMooch.

I’d very much appreciate it if any mooching Twitter expert wrote tips in the wiki help page for the “recently added books” page, as the capabilities this all makes possible are pretty neat.

Note that this feature is brand new, and the “newly added books” pages only contain books that have been added since this evening. This means that many of the genre searches you might try will come up with no books, simply because not enough time has elapsed for books of that genre to be added since the feature was added. However, in a few weeks, most of the search variations should yield results.

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A note about wishlist notifications vs. the “newly added books” page

These pages are updated as if they were the very last wishlist notification for any newly added book. I.e.: as if every book had an invisible “update me” member at the end of its wishlist.

Here is how this works:

• If nobody has this book on their wishlist, then the “recently added books” will update 2 minutes after the book is added. The two minute delay is there so that if a book is added and then whoops! it is removed, no notification is displayed.

• If there are several people who have wishlisted the book, the “newly added books” will only update one hour after the last email notification to all the wishlisted members. In this way, this new feature doesn’t preempt wishlist notifications: you’ll still get the emails when a book you want is added, and you’ll have at least an hour to get the book before it shows up on this page.
• If a book is mooched, reserved or removed before the “newly added books” page is updated, then the book is never added to the “newly added books” page.
• If a book is mooched, reserved or removed after the “newly added books” page is updated, then the book is removed from the “newly added books” page. People going to the “newly added books” page will not see books that are now no longer moochable from that member. Note that there is one minor glitch, namely that the “real time” update on this page only adds books (i.e. if you leave the page open and never reload it by hand), it doesn’t remove them if the book is now unavailable. To see an updated version of the page with unavailable books removed, you need to reload the page in your web browser.

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Ok, now let me explain how to use all these features.

You’ll see the new “recent” button on the “browse” page:

the page you get defaults to showing you all books as they are added to BookMooch. It looks like this:

the rounded grey box which shows you the new books automatically updates every minute or two, and it uses very little of your computer power (and none of BookMooch’s), so feel free to leave it up all day.

There is a lot packed into each entry on the page, so let me go step by step through it. One reason it’s so packed with data is because Twitter, which I’m using to manage this feature, limits each line to 140 characters. I need to make each letter count.

Here is what a single book line looks like:

The book title is given first. If the title is more than 70 characters long, only the first 70 characters are shown.

Next, the author name is displayed. If the book title is quite long and the author name is quite long, only the book title is given. This doesn’t happen very often, though.

Next, the URL to the book at BookMooch is given. If you’re interested in this book, click this URL.

Note that the URL is a new, very short version of the book URL, in a new format of http://bookmooch.com/ISBN — if you ever need a short URL to paste into an email, you’re welcome to do this (ie, to trim http://bookmooch.com/detail/1416524541 into http://bookmooch.com/1416524541).

An aside: while working to make this very short URL, I noticed that some people mis-type common URLs at BookMooch, such as “http://bookmooch.com/m” (leaving off the trailing /) — I now transparently “fix” the most common typos and they work as you’d expect, redirecting you automatically to the right URL.

Next on the line is the BookMooch userid of the person giving this book away:

Twitter uses #tags to indicate important searchable tags, which is why the # is present so many times on this line. It also means that you can use the twitter web site to search for any BookMooch username, and you’ll see (on twitter.com) their books as they add them.

Next, the country of the book owner listing this book is displayed, as a two-digit code (ie, USA is “US”)

Next, the main genres this book is categorized in are shown, in a very abbreviated format:

In this example, #chld = children’s book, and #clssc = classics. If there are too many genres for a book for the 140 character limit, as many as will fit are shown.

Finally, how long ago the book was added is displayed:

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Now, let’s go back to the “recently added books” form itself.

You can select a genre, and then click the “genre” button to view only newly added books in a certain genre. The list looks like this:

Note that only the “top genres” from the “browse topics” page are used. I’ve been talking to the BookMooch admins and they’re about to give me a more useful list of genres, so this will change in a few days.

the same kind of search is possible for countries, which is very useful if you prefer to mooch books from people in your own country:

At the top right of this page, and of every page of the “recently added books” feature set, you’ll find an “advanced search” button:

this brings you to a page where you specify a genre and a country that you’d like to restrict your view to.

For example, you can show only “Romance” novels in the “United States”

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As of today, you can now see a “recent” button on the inventory page for every member.

this will give you a live page of books added by that member:

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I haven’t yet mentioned the “twitter feed” button that is on the top right of every “recently added books” page:

If you click this (or the “join the conversation” link at the bottom right of each page) you’ll be taken to a twitter.com page that is equivalent to the BookMooch.com page you were just viewing:

If you have a twitter account, you might want to follow the “bookmooch” account on Twitter and use any of the dozens of Twitter goodies out there to do neat things.

For example, if you go to your own inventory page at BookMooch and click on the twitter feed link (editor: I just noticed that button is missing, will fix tomorrow), you might see:

You could then (for example) use a Twitter Widget, such as the “Widget Search” to build an automatically-updating widget of your inventory for your web site.

this is a really convenient way to embed your BookMooch inventory on Facebook or Myspace.

You can also very easily search newly added books inside Twitter itself. For example if you type “bookmooch #us #scifi” then this will match the “bookmooch” user (which is where the feed comes from) and the country “us” (United States) and the Science Fiction genre.

There’s a lot packed into this new feature, and I’m sure I’ve omitted some neat things that are possible, so please leave comments to this blog entry if you’ve got more ideas!

-john

Any place you see a bio photo, such as on Mark’s page, you can now click on the small photo:

and you’ll see a much larger version of their photo:

the zoomed image shown can only be large as the source image was: if the person uploaded only a small photo of themselves (example), the zoom will show a small version too. However, lots of people (example) uploaded large photos of themselves, so that’s what you can now see.

I know this is just a small tweak: I’ve started work on having BM host book-cover images itself, rather than pointing to Amazon, and the work to make this bio-photo-zoom feature work was also needed to make book covers zoomable too. Amazon supplies book covers zoomed down to all sorts of different sizes, and I’d like to be able to display them at sizes I want, so that I could do (for example) a clean looking “browse-books-by-covers” feature.

-john

I have made about 35 boxes of mooch cards and 100 boxes of bookmarks available for mooching in the USA.

How to mooch?

First, give a little by clicking: [give a little]

then click to mooch 1000 cards: [mooch cards]

or click to mooch 500 bookmarks: [mooch bookmarks]

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I am only sending these cards to moochers who give a little. Our printing costs for these cards is quite high (about $20 per box, plus postage to us, and then to you).

This will use up most of the remaining stock of cards, and about half the stock of remaining bookmarks which were printed last year.

Brits: there are plenty of bookmarks and mooch cards available for mooching being sent from the UK.

The good news: the BookMooch app for the iPhone is all finished.

The bad news: I can’t let anyone use it, because Amazon has decided that only they get to have an iPhone app that displays their book data.

Worse yet, Amazon has been recently enforcing this position and threatened both Delicious Monster (twittered) and Pocketpedia with total suspension of all access to Amazon’s book data unless they complied (both did as Amazon requested and pulled their iPhone apps).

Amazon recently changed the book information feed that BM (and others) use from being called “Amazon Web Services” to now being called the “Product Advertising API”. They also changed the terms of service to be much more strict: “You will not use the …Data Feed…in any… manner, that does not have the principal purpose of advertising and marketing the Amazon Site and driving sales of products and services on the Amazon Site.” It’s unfortunate that they’ve decided to become less open, and this change of theirs affects a large number of book-related web sites.

It’s also arguable that Delicious Monster, Goodreads and BookMooch are now in violation of this new clause, since all these web sites have a more engaging “principal purpose” than advertising Amazon. There are a small number of iPhone apps that search Amazon available on iTunes, but all of them seem to do nothing more than “search for book, find it, click *buy*” — ie, they really are nothing but promotional vehicles, and it seems that Amazon doesn’t pursue them.

Given that BookMooch uses Amazon’s book information to power itself, and that Amazon is very-much enforcing this new clause in their terms of use, I’m holding off on submitting the BookMooch iPhone app to Apple. It seems likely to me that Amazon would notice and force us to remove it, and we also would risk their totally disabling the BookMooch web site as they have threatened other sites with.

I found out about this a few weeks ago, but by that point I was already about 70% finished doing the iPhone app, and was in a $2700 contract (having paid half already) for the completion, so I couldn’t back out. What I’ve done is to get the iPhone app finished, and now wait and see if Amazon changes its position.

Alternatively, if BookMooch didn’t use Amazon’s book information, we could do as wanted and release the iPhone app right away.

I’m looking into other sources for book data, and this might be the way we go in the future. BookMooch currently refers about $20,000 a month worth of book sales to Amazon and we receive a sales commission for doing this, which partially funds BookMooch’s expenses.

If BookMooch stopped using Amazon’s data, we would need to grow the monthly donations by about 40% to cover the loss in commission revenue, and we might possibly need to raise money to pay for the book data, if we went with a source of book data that charged monthly fees (most book-information data sources do charge).

It might help if moochers contact Amazon’s customer support and write “I urge you to change your policy regarding not allowing web sites to build iphone apps if they use the Amazon Product Advertising API. Your policy is making me feel bad about buying from Amazon.” Or something to that effect.

Below I’m including some screen captures of my using the BookMooch iPhone application.

I’ve fixed the problems with Amazon searching on BookMooch, so these things should all work again:

- browse for books, search amazon http://bookmooch.com/m/browse

- add books with amazon search http://bookmooch.com/m/add

- moochbar http://bookmooch.com/m/moochbar

- accented chåràctérs such as searching for Émile

Over the past few days, it was possible, if you were persistent, to add a book to BookMooch from Amazon with just the ISBN number, but unfortunately no information was brought in from Amazon about the book. There were a few thousand titles in BookMooch like this: books without author or title information. I’ve written a small program to find all these books and to pull the missing info from Amazon. This should be complete in a few hours: if you still see books without an author and title (in a few hours), please inform tech support about it so I can try to fix it.

The one thing I cannot get to work is searching for Japanese text against amazon.co.jp. Japanese users of BookMooch will need to use the ISBN number to search Amazon inside BookMooch, or find the book at Amazon.co.jp and add it to BookMooch with the moochbar. Note, however, that once a Japanese book is in BookMooch, that the BookMooch search does work with Japanese.

If you have any further problems searching Amazon from within BookMooch, please post a blog comment here with details.

-john

Searching Amazon inside BookMooch isn’t working at the moment, and it’ll probably take me a day or two to get it working again.

The reason is that Amazon has added an extra encryption/authentication step to its programming API, and BookMooch needs to support it.

Amazon did send email newsletters warning about the change, but they kept referring to their “Product Advertising API”, which isn’t something I thought I used. However, apparently the “Product Advertising API” is Amazon’s new name for “Amazon Web Services”, and it really is what BookMooch uses. Whoops, sorry!

I’m sure I can get this working, but it has some complicated bits to it, so it might take me 48 hours to get it right.

-john

Sorry about that! BookMooch was unavailable for the past 12 hours. The computer it runs on ran out of memory, so I had to restart it.

I have a new server, with 3 times the memory ready to go, however I am currently on vacation (camping in Europe) so I don’t want to switch to the new machine until I get back.

BM admin Mark has my mobile telephone number and texted me with the problem, and I worked on it when I woke up. There was no data loss – the machine just needed to be restarted, that’s all.

-john (in a sleazy netcafe outside Frankfurt, Germany)