Some weeks ago, I heard about Redis from Chu Yeow’s tweet. Redis is a key-value database, similar with memcached, but with the persistence feature. And one of the first things that popped up into my mind was, this is going to be handy to extend Singapore National Library Board (NLB) catalog search on BookJetty.

So I stopped my adventure with iPhone for a while to work on this hack. After all, BookJetty was built to be a proxy to plug-in other catalogs easily. With the plug, all vertical features found in BookJetty such as importing books to your shelves, tagging, book reviews, ratings, the social networking features, Google Books preview, author pages, cross libraries search, and other vertical features will be immediately available for the catalog. Well, with just a plug or an adapter.

I was lucky that Redis 0.900 (1.0 RC 1) was just released, though not a production release, I took my chance. It was very Ruby to work with Redis; download the codes, read the documentation, bam bam and you got it working, one of the reasons why I chose Redis over Tokyo Cabinet (What a name!). More about the differences between Redis and Tokyo Cabinet here.

There is an issue with NLB search result, it does not return ISBN and some other information BookJetty needs to perform the matching and to display the information nicely. Thus, it needs a second call, and it is expensive. A fast database is required to cache this kind of information, and Redis is the answer.

Previously on BookJetty, you can only search Amazon catalog, and BookJetty will find matches in NLB catalog based on the book ISBNs. But due to data discrepancies, some books found in Amazon are not found in NLB.

As a library user myself, I had always wanted to search the other way round. And today, I’m glad to announce to you, and I hope you are as excited as me. We can now do the other way round; search NLB catalog, and BookJetty is smart enough to find matches in Amazon and probably from other sources in the future. I dreamt about this, and today that dream is fulfilled. Click image or here for a sample search.

There is one limitation though, the search API does not sort by the newest books as in NLB online catalog. Hopefully there will be an upgrade to the API soon, and we would be close in our quest to find the holy grail for our local library search. Meanwhile, let’s cherish what we have.

May the books be with you.

Hacheette Book Group is back with its free books giveaway on BookJetty. Halloween is around the corner, so it’s getting spooky this time with these collection of books.

And all are yours for free if you are a BookJetty member (sign up as one if you are not) and put at least one book on your bookshelf by end of November. Note that this contest is only open for those who reside in the United States or Canada, and remember to update your profile country in BookJetty.

Special thanks for Hachette Book Group, the last book giveaways have brought some surprises to the winners with a big box of books arriving at your porch.

1. THE HERETIC’S DAUGHTER By Kathleen Kent $24.99, 0316024481
   ISOLATION By Travis Thrasher $13.99, 0446505544
2. THE 13 BEST HORROR STORIES OF ALL TIME By Leslie Pockell $21.99, 9780446679503
3. THE MONSTERS: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein By Dorothy Hoobler , Thomas Hoobler $14.99, 9780316066402
4. THE MYRTLES PLANTATION: The True Story of America’s Most Haunted House By Frances Kermeen $7.99, 9780446614153
5. GHOSTLY ENCOUNTERS: True Stories of America’s Haunted Inns and Hotels By Frances Kermeen $7.99, 9780446611459
6. THE TERROR By Dan Simmons $14.99, 9780316017459
7. DRACULA By Bram Stoker $10.99, 0316014818
8. WHEN GHOSTS SPEAK: Understanding the World of Earthbound Spirits By Mary Ann Winkowski $24.99, 9780446581189
9. THE HISTORIAN By Elizabeth Kostova $9.99, 9780316067942

Yesterday Google Book Search officially launched a set of free tools to allow anyone to embed books from the Google Book Search Index. And it also introduces Book Search API for greater integration to its search index and readers’ ratings, reviews and book collections.

BookJetty is glad to be able to integrate with Google Book Search, by introducing a new list type that indicates if book previews are available, and the embedded book preview just makes it feel closer to having a real bookshelf.

I’m really happy for this new addition to BookJetty, find it very handy to check out if books are worth a read, and glad to have BookJetty mentioned as one of its case studies.

I’m glad to announce BookJetty first books giveway, thanks to Hachette Book Group USA, 10 best selling books offered for free to host Back to School Book Bonanza! For 5 lucky BookJetty users.

To be entitled, you just need to write one book review in the month of September, and winners will be picked up randomly. I’ll inform the winners through email on October 1.

There’s only one catch, according to Hachet Book Group USA, the giveaway is only for BookJetty users residing in United States and Canada, sorry guys. So do remember to update your country profile in BookJetty.

Here is the list of 10 best-selling books for the giveaway:

1. Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World
   By Vicky Myron, Bret Witter
2. The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning
   By Peter Trachtenberg
3. Say You’re One of Them
   By Uwem Akpan
4. Bo’s Lasting Lessons: The Legendary Coach Teaches the Timeless Fundamentals of Leadership
   By Bo Schembechler , John Bacon
5. Knowing Right from Wrong: A Christian Guide to Conscience
   By Fr. Thomas D. Williams
6. Titanic’s Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler
   By Brad Matsen
7. A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative
   By Roger von Oech (25th Anniversary)
8. Ethics 101: What Every Leader Needs To Know
   By John Maxwell
9. The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance
   By Polly Young-Eisendrath
10. Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey
    By William Least Heat-Moon

BookJetty finally makes it to Digital Life, I’m humbled to read BookJetty mentioned as one of the high flying-tech from Singapore, considering it was started from a bare simple application started out of curiosity.

Hopefully with this article BookJetty will be able to reach out to more book lovers and library users in Singapore. Special thanks to Irene for the writeup.

Click here for the full article on Straits Times.

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.

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