My Library, Your Library

Google has just announced MyLibrary, a feature that permits Google Book Search users to collect books of interest, tag them, search within the collection, and share them; RSS support is also present. MyLibrary is based on Google's Custom Search Engine, which I blogged about recently.

Missing from MyLibrary, as is the case for CSE in general, is any kind of boosting for relevance in main index searching. One hypothetical example where this might be useful: if I was researching Chinese history, specifically the Boxer Rebellion, and if a Harvard Chinese history professor had compiled a list of "best works on pre-republic China" then I would certainly hope that his list would be boosted, if I were to apply reasonable keywords.

Also notably missing currently is integration with Google Scholar. In the academic environment, books are of only so much utility to broad swathes of scholarship; the most useful and current information is found in pre-prints or journals. One could also imagine establishing pre-set filters for specific journals, with specific keyword searches, and have that available as a shareable RSS feed. OpenSearch has long provided some of the underlying fundamentals of this functionality, and other pieces are widely available elsewhere. For example, I have seen premier examples constructed from Yahoo Pipes.

Rick Prelinger has voiced concerns that this service co-opts aspects of LibraryThing: "Google has rolled out My Library, which looks a lot like a skeletal version of LibraryThing plus an anonymous corporate skin and minus community spirit." As he rightly points out, Google's MyLibrary lacks a level of community participation present in LibraryThing; on the other hand, MyLibrary provides a level of in-collection full-text searching that a bibliographically-based aggregator like LibraryThing cannot provide.

It's fascinating to see this explosion of services relating to book collections, which arguably make more informed discovery and consequent use more likely.

In a long but extremely thought-provoking article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Steve Wasserman writes in "Goodbye to All That: The decline of the coverage of books isn't new, benign, or necessary" that the decline in book reviews in U.S. newspapers is a choice made on the basis of criteria that do not optimize social utility. Oddly, this is occurring at a time when more literature is more widely available -- even if we consider only paper copies, much less the digital -- than ever before.

Nevertheless, even a cursory glance at the landscape of contemporary American bookselling and publishing makes it hard not to believe we are living at the apotheosis of our culture. Never before in the whole of human history has more good literature, attractively presented, sold for still reasonably low prices, been available to so many people. You would need several lifetimes over doing nothing but lying prone in a semi-darkened room with only a lamp for illumination just to make your way through the good books that are on offer.

This is, strangely, a story that has not received near the attention it deserves.

The services that Librarything, MyLibrary, and their kin provide are useful utilities, new entrants in an electronic landscape being painted before our eyes. Whether our interest in books themselves will persist deeply enough for these new and wonderful tools to serve as levers providing for our greater enjoyment and education has yet to be seen. One hopes.

As Steve Wasserman concludes:

[T]here is no more useful framework for understanding America and the world it inhabits. It is through the work of novelists and poets that we understand how we imagine ourselves and contend with the often elusive forces--of which language itself is a foremost factor--that shape us as individuals and families, citizens and communities, and it is through our historians and scientists, journalists and essayists that we wrestle with how we have lived, how the present came to be, and what the future might bring.