Remember how we used to browse books in the bookstores, and check out the innerside of the back-cover, which usually contain a short biography of an author. I find that knowing the author’s biography helps me to appreciate his/her book more, and helps me to decide if I should read or buy the book at the very first place.

There are hundreds of thousands of authors in BookJetty database at the moment, and it is definitely not possible to update all at once. If you are BookJetty users, when you are free, do help out to update the author pages, and gracias for that. Below is the screenshot of how it looks like.

You can choose to become fan of an author; author’s average rating and other statistics are also shown on the page. This will help you to find out how popular is an author.

Better Book Covers and Scrolling Effects

Book covers in the scroller now have some dimension to it, it now looks more like a real books instead of just cover sheets, and I’ve also sped up the scrolling effect. With chunky covers, slower scrolling effect is quite distracting for the eyes, and believe it or not, you may feel dizzy after awhile.

Polaroid Style Pictures

Other notable enhancement, is the palaroid-like user pictures with username shown below. I find that picture by itself without the username is less interactive and harder to associate with.

That’s all for now, stay tuned for other interesting additions to BookJetty, and happy reading!

The plan for the new BookJetty was to bring social elements and other book related applications to BookJetty, on top of the existing feature to check books availability in the libraries. The new BookJetty marks the shift from a pet project to an official product supported by Pluit Solutions.

It was a daunting task from the beginning, considering there were so many things to do with very limited resources. The bad news also the existing codebase did not look too good, it was a pet-project codebase, patches were applied without proper product plan, it was on Rails 1.x, there were no unit testings, and stylesheets were not very organised either. It meant basically lots of re-works.

After much persistence and lots of hard work, today I am grateful and glad to announce that the new BookJetty is finally up!

For a quick tour of what’s new, here are some of the highlights:

Connect with Your Friends’ Bookshelves

You don’t have to physically be at your friend’s home to check out what they have in their bookshelves. BookJetty now has a news feed that updates you of the new additions to your friends’ bookshelf, new reviews, new discussions and other activites.

Discussion Boards

It would be nice to be able to create a discussion topics about the books you are currently reading or have read. And you can now create a discussion topic.

Import Books

The problem with cataloging your books is when you get started. If you are bookaholic, there may be just too many books to add. Fear not if you have maintained your book list some where. You can easily import them to BookJetty. The import feature is smart enough to detect ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 from source data, irregardless of the text format. You can query from a webpage, an uploaded file or copy and paste text with ISBNs.

Invitation

To help you to start building your network of friends the invite feature is handy to invite your friends from your Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. It can also import from your Plaxo address book.

Inbox and Sent Messages

Now you do not have to depend on email notifications to communicate with BookJetty members, the thread-based inbox message helps to keep you in conversation with your friends.

Notifications

Built-in notifications to keep you informed of the activities related to you, such as replies to your reviews, discussion posts, or comments on your profile page.

Smart Bookshelf

Inline “Add to shelf” link can be found anywhere when you browse for books. Mouse over for more options as to which shelf to add to. On top of inline-rating feature, now you can also edit your bookshelf date with a simple date picker.

User Wall Posts

Previously there is a shout box on your user profile page. I thought it was too small and restricted. Now a bigger commenting box is available on your profile page. You can also reply to your friend’s post in a thread to keep the conversation going.

Explore

Based on the statistical data from members’ activities, various explore categories have been created, which include most popular, top rated, top favorites, and most discussed. You can also browse the different periods of time, i.e. this week, this month, this year or all time.

RSS Feed

If you are an RSS junkie, you can follow your friend’s bookshelf through RSS feed.

Privacy Control

I understand that it is important for you to control who can see your data and bookshelf, there is now a finer control of who can see your data.

Time Zone Support

With time adjusted according to your time zone, you won’t be confused about when exactly a post has been made. The best part is you do not have to configure your time zone, as it is automatically calculated with the help of Javascript.

Unicode Support

BookJetty now supports UTF-8 encoding, no problem if you have to comment in Chinese, Japanese and other non-latin characters.

More Bookstores

With the Unicode support, more book stores have been added, i.e. Amazon France, German, and Japan. More will be introduced in the future, the next one will be Barnes and Nobles.

Third Party Advertising

I have also introduced third-party advertising from Google Adsense. The advertising revenue I hope will be able to help to reduce the increasing cost needed the develop and support BookJetty.

Overall the new BookJetty has a better and more consistent layout. And from now on, there will be more regular updates, as the base is now ready. Coming out soon is the group/community feature.

I hope that you like the new BookJetty. For screenshots quick tour, click here.

Since Prof. Schubert Foo mentioned about BookJetty in VALA conference, there have been quite a number of requests from BookJetty users and librarians to link up their libraries with BookJetty.

And BookJetty welcomes the 10 most recent libraries that BookJetty links up with:

Australia

• City of Boroondara Library
• Corangamite Regional Library
• Stonnington Library
• Monash Public Library Service
• Darebin Libraries

Singapore

• Nanyang Technological University

United States

• Coastal Resource Sharing Network
• King County Library System
• Pascal Delivers
• Santa Cruz Public Libraries

So special thanks especially to Prof. Schubert Foo to create the awareness, and to people like Hazman Aziz, Anne Holmes, Elaine Hopper, John Ruddle, Caroline Ramsden, John Edstrom, Lianne Gee, Stuart Lutzenhiser, Neredowell, Jessica Goodman, and others I could have inadvertently missed, for their suggestions and help with the link-up.

There are a few libraries suggested by some users could not be linked up because their z39.50 gateway is not active. I’m really sorry for that, while there are a few others are pending their verifications on the availability of the gateway with their librarians.

I’ve also worked on a simple XML spec which libraries can implement to link up with BookJetty, but the spec I think still need improvement, and I’ve yet to find more time to do that. The idea is so that libraries that do not support z39.50 gateway, with their internal IT staff support, can help to build that simple XML interface. While on my side, I’ll need to create the adapter.

In all, I’m really glad to see people around the world are seeing the value of BookJetty, which was started off merely as my pet project and to solve my own problems. It has encouraged me a lot in my long and tiring journey for the last few months, relentlessly days and nights, to work on the new release of BookJetty.

I hope with the new release, BookJetty will help to make our life more fun as a reader, a book lover, and people who know that there are tonnes of knowledge and pleasures, hidden down there in piles of writings binded as books.

And it’s definitely gonna be more fun if you can link up with your friends and family bookshelves, on top of your reviews, libraries, and online bookstores, all put under one roof with simple and user friendly interface. That is what I hope to achieve for the next release.

And the good news, I’m almost done, so, stay tuned for the new BookJetty this April.

The VALA Conference is the Australian forum where the use of technology in libraries is discussed. Held twice a year, this year’s conference is the 14th Biennial Conference, and it continues to draw participations from librarians worldwide.

The 2008 conference was just over, held from Feb 5-7, 2008, at Melbourne Convention Centre.

It featured keynote speakers, Prof. Schubert Foo (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Prof. Michael Geist (University of Ottawa, Canada), Prof. Peter Lor (University of Pretoria, South Africa), Andy Powell (Eduserv Foundation, UK), Stuart Weibel (OCLC Programs and Research, USA) and Luke Wroblewski (Yahoo! Inc & LukeW Interface Designs, USA)

Hazman Aziz, an ardent trainee librarian in Nanyang Technological University (NTU), who has initiated NTU library catalogue integration with BookJetty, was in the conference; he hinted that BookJetty was mentioned by Prof. Schubert Foo.

From his review of the conference, Prof. Schubert shared that library can play the role of an info-concierge, where individual info object is a self sustaining, self containing node unit, can be content or service, in any format. The connectivity can be attained in many ways and not necessarily in a single way such as a mesh (web) of information. This example can be illustrated on BookJetty.com, where libraries such as NTU, National University of Singapore (NUS) and National Library Board (NLB) have integrated the connectivity for user discovered contents.

References:

• VALA 2008 14th Biennial Conference and Exhibition, by Hazman Aziz
• VALA 2008 Conference - Day 2 - Schubert Foo - Plenary, by Connecting Librarian
• Prof. Schubert Foo’s Keynote
• VALA 2008 Conference Papers
• More about BookJetty integration with libraries

BookJetty is preparing itself to support the social elements so you can follow your friends’ or strangers’ bookshelves.

Did a face lift, opting for a simpler homepage, adding friends ala Twitter.com, with simple news feed to keep you updated of what’s new in your network.

This is probably the biggest change ever at one go, gonna tidy up some back-end codes as well, planning to go REST-ful with RSpec/Behaviour Driven Development (BDD), so it’ll be easier to maintain, as the functionalities get more complex.

So it’s going to take a while, but a sneak preview into what BookJetty will look like. Hope you will like it.

Home Page

Dashboard

User Profile Page

The Digital Movement guys are back in action with PopOut 07. Thanks to them for inviting me to share a bit about BookJetty, and I also look forward to learn from the sharing of other startups which have already made the cut, like Bezurk.com, Recruit.net and the others.

It’s a short meet-up, two and a half hours, this coming Thursday night, at Suntec City, do pop by if you have nothing else better do. To register, click here.

UPDATED (07 Oct):

Definitely a night to remember, for those who were there, thank you all for your warm response, for the whole TDM Team, thank you for the hard work put in, for the slot given, and for another great event.

For those who missed it, here are some reviews by fellow bloggers:

• Live Blog From Popout 07, by The Digital Movement (TDM)
• Popout Fizzles Out, by Ian
• Honestly, PopOut was good except for one thing, by Aen
• Live blogging from PopOut 07, by Singapore Entrepreneurs
• Post from PopOut, by ThoughtMonkeys
• A decent event @ Popout! 2007, by Priscilla
• PopOut! Singapore: The book nerd who wowed the crowd, by MediaSlut
• POPOUT ‘07′ - Emerging Web Startups, by
  Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF)
• PopOut! Singapore - Preview of Firefox 3.0, by Claudia

When I built BookJetty, I knew that I am not going to stop at just one library, our good home library, Singapore National Library Board. I dreamt for BookJetty to integrate with a lot more libraries worldwide, and to benefit more book lovers around the world.

Three weeks ago, I started the quest to fulfill that dream, and I digged through documents, websites, guidelines related to Z3950 protocol and MARC standards, visiting hundreds of online library catalogues worldwide, and rewriting BookJetty library module to create a facade that can easly link up with more libraries.

And today, I am glad to announce that BookJetty finally goes
international, integrating with 300 libraries from 10 countries, covering United States, United Kingdom, Canda, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Ireland, South Africa, and probably more in the future.

For a start, when you sign up for a BookJetty account, your library preference will be empty. When you try to list books with library search, you will be redirected to your library preferences page.

Select on one or more libraries in your area, you can also filter the list of libraries by country. Click once to add the library to your list, or click again to remove.

On your library list you should see all the libraries you have added earlier. You can also click on del to remove a library from the list.

To sort, click on Reorder, then drag and drop to re-order your libraries sequence. Click Done Reordering when you are done.

When you go back to your book list, it will search the first library in your list. To check other libraries, mouse over to the library name, and select another library name, and it will perform the search without a page refresh, thanks to AJAX for that.

Click on library call number, to view the book holding information or to reserve. Or if you mouse over, you can also click on SMS call no to your phone on a small yellow tooltip, if you need to visit the library to pickup the book. For special integration with Singapore National Library Board (NLB), you are able to view holding information directly from BookJetty.

The library search on the book list is very convenient to check multiple books availability in a library. But if you go to a book details page, you will be able to check if the book is found in all your local libraries.

If you no longer need the library service, you can click on the collapse button on top right corner.

Collapsed state of library search panel, it will stay collapsed when you browse other books until you expand it again.

Now try BookJetty with your local libraries. Click here for the list of libraries supported in BookJetty. If you can’t find your local library, suggest it here, or find out more about library integration with BookJetty.

If you encounter any problem, drop me a note, and I hope that you will find BookJetty useful. There are still tonnes of todo lists to work on BookJetty, your suggestions, comments, and bug reports will be definitely priceless to me.

Thank you.

Yes, you get it right, it is a web service and it is with Singapore National Library Board (NLB), and it has been successfully integrated nicely with BookJetty for slightly over a week in stealth mode, and today after it is more or less stable, I can finally announce it.

This is probably one of first integration using web service with a public sector in Singapore. In anyway, it’s a new beginning, which I hope this will lead to more of amazing stuff that will benefit many when more organisations be it public or private starts to open up their non-sensitive data through an Application Programming Interface (API).

I am glad that today has finally come, before, BookJetty has been slogging through the hard way, using screen scrapping and session pooling, with worries that the service can easily break with a small change in the library online catalog, scalability issue due to sessions maintenance, and worse, blocked.

Today, those worries should not no longer be there, it definitely makes day, and the day for all the BookJetty users in Singapore.

Many thanks to Singapore NLB for taking this initiative, special thanks to Jamieson Teo who helped to advocate and facilitate this integration, and to Ling Xia, for her fast and excellent support during the integration phase, and finally to the management for giving the green light.

My warmest gratitude to all.

BookJetty gets another new feature, last night, I applied the Add to Favorites feature replacing the loveit tag. All books tagged with loveit are now marked as your favorite books, and that tag has been removed.

The Add to favorites icon is a nice looking small flower-pattern icon on your book list, when not selected, it is shown in light gray to reduce the amout of noise in the book list. Following its close cousin, the AJAX-based star rating feature, adding to favorites is a breeze; just click on the icon without a page refresh.

On your book details page, we now have an indicator showing home many people have favorited this book, and you can also add/remove from favorites through a shortcut found under your shelf panel.

On your book list page, there is an additional favorites shelf to filter out your favorite books.

Favorites can be a great indicator for a good book supporting the book rating and review information. So start adding your favorite books now, and more to come for BookJetty.

I have long yearned for BookJetty to support the rating and review features, and finally last night, I managed to roll it out, and here are some highlights of BookJetty new features:

AJAX-based 5-star rating

I was considering between digg-style rating, 4-star rating and 5-star rating. But after weighing the pros and cons; for book reviews, I think the best is still the 5-star rating.

AJAX star rating system was used to speed up the rating process, and to allow users to rate with minimum effort. Mouse over to show the selected star, and click to rate. And I’m quite happy with the result, I rated 71 books in my shelves in no time.

Book Review

To review a book , you need to first add a book to your bookshelf, the book review form will appear below the book description. Latest reviews from everyone will be shown in the homepage.

Comment on Review

A review is like a blog post, other users will be able to comment on it If someone comments on your review, depending on your email notification settings, you can be notified through email.

Bookshelves Side Panel

User profile page has also gotten a face lift, other than some reorganisation of the account maintenance menus, we can now view a user’s tags cloud, with a summary of wanted, reading and read books.

Email Notification

An additional section under you account maintenance, to configure your email notification preferences.

Recent Shouts Layout Re-design

Recent shouts layout was quite cluttered previously, they are now organised and grouped by each category, with each category showing a maximum of 4 recent shouts. It is definitely much easier to view and trace now.

What’s Next for BookJetty?

I will be looking into ways to integrate with other libraries around the world using Z39.50 protocols, which should allow retrieval of library call no, but without the holding information.

If you are a library representative, and would love to explore a closer integration with BookJetty similar with what I did for Singapore National Library Board, do drop me an email.

Other than that, some users have suggested me to look into building BookJetty-Facebook application. I’ll start reading Facebook Platform when I am freed up. And other features like the importing feature, add friends and groups, create discussion threads, and others will also be coming.

Hope you will love this batch of new features, so start rating and reviewing your books! Your feedbacks and comments will be much appreciated. :)