openlibrary's openlibrary

Building the Internet’s library is no easy task, and it can’t be done alone. Thankfully, we’re not alone in wanting to provide access to knowledge, books, and reading — which is why we’re excited to introduce Trusted Book Providers into Open Library. ... [More] This feature allows us to provide direct “Read” links to a number of carefully selected, reputable sources of books online. Integrations with Project Gutenberg and LibriVox are up and running, and integrations with Standard Ebooks, OpenStax, and Wikisource are in progress. By linking to these outstanding organizations, we’re excited to help promote their wonderful work as well as give Open Library patrons easy access to more trusted sources for digital books. We see this as a step in helping the world of open access books flourish. [Less]

The Open Library catalog is used by patrons from across the globe, but its usage is predominated by English speakers (32% US, 9% India, 5% UK, 4% Canada). This is driven by four factors which we’re working to change. International Holdings – It goes without saying that, in order to be an Open Library for […]

Hi Open Library Community! This is going to be a less formal post detailing some of our recent community meetings and exciting Q3 (quarter 3) opportunities to learn, celebrate, and participate with the Open Library project. Earlier this Month 🔭 ... [More] 5-Year Vision (community notes) 2021-09-28 @ 10am PT ☑️ 2021 Year-End Review (community notes) 2021-10-12 […] [Less]

For nearly 15 years Open Library has been giving patrons free access to information about books in its catalog, direct to their computers. But for millions of readers across the globe who rely on their phones for access, this hasn’t always presented the ideal mobile reading experience. This year, a volunteer within the Open Library […]

By Sabreen Parveen with Ray Berger & Mek A Forward from the Mentors For book lovers who use openlibrary.org every day, it may be easy to forget what it felt like to visit the website for the first time. Some features which some were able to learn the hard way — through trial and error […]

We’ve all heard the advice, don’t judge a book by its cover. But then how should we go about identifying books which are good for us? The secret depends on understanding two things: What is a book? What are our preferences? We can’t easily answer the second question without understanding the first one. But we […]

By: Nolan Windham & Mek I’m Nolan Windham, an incoming freshman at Claremont McKenna College. This summer I participated in my first Google Summer of Code with the Internet Archive. I’ll be sharing the achievements I’ve made with the Open Book Genome Project sequencer, an open source tool which extracts structured data from the contents […]

You can now publicly review books using structured book #tags on Open Library with Community Reviews. Take a look, try it out, and send us feedback! Many social book websites including Goodreads & LibraryThing feature text reviews from the community. Why hasn’t Open Library? As a non-profit library service with a small staff, there are […]

As part of an open-source project, the Open Library blog has a growing number of contributors: from librarians and developers to designers, researchers, and book lovers. Each contributor writes from their perspective, sharing contributions they’re ... [More] making to the Open Library catalog. As such, the Open Library blog has a versatile tagging system to help patrons […] [Less]

Try it here! If you like it, share it. Bringing 100 Years of Librarian-Knowledge to Life By Nick Norman with Drini Cami & Mek At the Library Leaders Forum 2020 (demo), Open Library unveiled the beta for what it’s calling the Library Explorer: an immersive interface which powerfully recreates and enhances the experience of navigating […]