In the past week, we’ve heard from many librarians about the need to improve the librarian tools.
First of all, let us express our gratitude to all the librarians for making aNobii a nicer place for everyone. You guys rock. And judging from the number of emails we received from users voicing their support for the librarians, we are not the only ones who think so!
Let us explain why some useful librarian features are now lacking. The gist of it is that some features could result in sweeping data changes that are often hard to reverse. Properly opening these features requires an overhaul of the current librarian system.
When the requests were few, the need to add these features was little. But as many of you have pointed out, we’ve grown to the point where the lack of features posted a significant problem. It’s time for a change.
In the past few days, our team had been working hard to figure out the design of a new system that could address librarians’ needs. We now have a blueprint.
Next, we’ll build and release these changes on a weekly basis, starting this week. And we’ll surely keep you all posted on the progress.
Let us once again applaud to all the librarians. We heard you. Stay tuned!
For the past 2 months, our Italy team has been busy planning a secret project. We are now excited to announce that we are our partnering with Rcs to publish a book authored by aNobiians from Italy!
The idea is simple: top 1000 book reviews on the top 100 books.
In the coming weeks, our Italy team leader Barbara Sgarzi (barbara.sgarzi@anobii.com) will begin to contact some of you to ask for permissions to include the reviews in the book. All profits will go to a charity to be announced later.
This little gem shall come out by the end this year. We’ll keep you all posted on the progress.
We are pleased to be an official partner of HKBF this year.
Earlier this year, the organizer decided to build, for the first time, an official website about HKBF that served the public. The website would include a book search, and that’s where we pitched in.
Here’s how it works. An exhibitor simply gives us a list of ISBNs of book it plans to sell at the book fair. We look up the details of each book from our database that contains millions of book records. Then we put them into an index. So when you do a search book title, you will see which the name and booth number of exhibitors that carry it.
Of course, the search results are only as good as the data provided by the exhibitors. So far, more than a hundred exhibitors, from big chains to independent publishers, have uploaded their data.
“Translating aNobii” is an important part of aNobii. Thanks to efforts by aNobiians from all over the world, now aNobii is available in 11 languages!
The last time we upgraded the translation system, we added voting to make the whole process more transparent and easier to participate. We made the text strings less fragmented to make the context clearer. And then we added search so you could find the strings easier.
Now we’ve added inline translation. When you see a sentence not translated or mis-translated, you can fix it by right-clicking the sentence directly. To active inline translation, simply click the “inline translation” button at the bottom right of each page.
Note 1: Translation options appear only in version other than English
Note 2: While most of the pages have inline translation enabled, a few do not. They will be in the future.
All our web servers went down at the same time. We restarted the servers and re-opened the site. After a while the web servers’ load jumped up until they went down again. This process repeated itself during the 12-hour down period.
What caused it
We have built redundancy into all our hardwares. In fact, we just added a backup load balancer (the machine that directs traffic to different web servers) at the beginning of the week. The chance that the hardware of all the web servers failed together was extremely low. That, along with other signs we were seeing, ruled out hardware problem. It wasn’t the traffic either. The incoming traffic pattern was not unlike the norm.
That left us with the programs. But it was difficult to further narrow the search. We looked at the heavy-duty programs like search indexing and the similarity engine. We spent hours looking but found nothing. Finally, tipped off by two unrelated books that strangely share the same number of readers, we found a book that, as a result of a number of merging, is claimed to have over 100,000 editions(!) Certain programs that touched this book duly went nuts. We fixed it and re-opened the site an hour after we found the culprit.
What now
We are reviewing the book merge process at the moment. The merging function is now temporarily off-line until we’ve added some ways to prevent this from happening.
A while ago we were contacted by the team that behind this interesting software called “Barcode Monster”. What it does is that it lets you scan barcodes with a standard web cam.
This is by no means a new attempt. We ourselves have tried half a dozen softwares that aim to do the same. Yet none matched our standards for speed and accuracy. So we never recommended any to aNobii members.
When we tried the beta version of Barcode Monster, we were simply blown away. Wow.
Speed: their demo video is no exaggeration. It is indeed as snappy as the video suggests.
Accuracy: we’ve used it to scan every single book we have in our office, and Barcode Monster gave the correct result every single time (not counting the time with a worn-out barcode sticker).
Our experience with it the last couple weeks has been excellent. And we’d like to hear more about what people think before we officially endorse it. Got a web cam? It’ll be great if you download the free trial version, test it out, and let us know what you think. Does it work for your web cam? Any issues you’ve come across? Write to us at contact@anobii.com. We’ll report the findings in a week.
Happy new year!
* A note from the Barcode Monster team: the software requires sharp images. Since you’ll be scanning up close, you’ll need to adjust the focus manually. If your web cam does not support manual focus, Barcode Monster may not work
Many of you should have found out that on aNobii, it was much easier to find a book by ISBN than by keywords. To put it mildly, our keyword search ranged from not very good to barely functional, depending on the language you used in the search.
We are happy to announce that this shall no longer be.
A while ago, we decided to rebuild the search from ground-up. The goals we set for ourselves:
Faster
The old one was slow, slow, slow, especially if you type in a lot of words, or if the words are rather common
More integrated
In the old one, you had to choose to search in one language only. And that often frustrated those who were multi-lingual. Must fix.
More comprehensive
When our internal search results in no matches, you should be able to do a web search right away
Recent search
You should be able to see and click on your most recent search terms
The other day a friend pointed at the “beta” sign next to our logo and asked when we’d move beyond that. The embarrassing truth is we’ve long gotten used to the beta sign and pushed it to the back of our minds.
Normally, you won’t want to wait till your new app is perfect to launch (see ship crap -> improve). So there’s a phase in which your app is public but crappy in some non-core areas. That’s when a beta sign is useful, to communicate a more accurate expectation and warn people ahead of likely and unpleasant surprises (told-ya!).
The thing is, once we put that sign up, we have little incentive to take it down. Why remove the shield that seemingly protects you from harsh criticism? Let’s wait a bit. Nobody gets hurt by the sign anyway …, so the thinking went.
And then someday, we just started to forget about the sign altogether … until a curious friend pointed out.
Today, a week after the 7,000,000th book have been added, we are officially moving out of beta. Hurray!
We’ve updated the shelf pages. One change is what happens when you go from one page to another via the “Next” or “Previous” button. In the old way, the whole page would refresh. Now, only the shelf part will change. The rest simply stays still.
This way of changing content is commonly called “Ajax”. The spirit is that only the parts that need to change will change, resulting in lighter load and speedier browsing.
But there’s a downside. Browsers are not designed for Ajax use. If you don’t refresh the whole page, the back (and forward) button will not work, along with history and bookmark. That’s a BIG downside, considering that the back button among the most used browser function.
There are hacks for fixing this. We surveyed a few and settled with HistoryManager. Problem is, the javascript framework we use is Mootools 1.2 and HM will only work in 1.1. We could wait, but the thought of a broken back button on aNobii was simply too painful to bear. So we opened HM up and did the update ourselves.
Thanks to volunteering efforts around the world, aNobii now supports 12 interface languages, with a couple more to come. Big thanks to every involved!
The current translation platform has a couple drawbacks:
1. In the translation spreadsheet, the un-translated texts are mixed with translated ones, making them difficult to spot.
2. It’s difficult to know which text is used in which page. In other words, texts that are no longer used will remain, making the translation process longer.
3. HTML tags are embedded into the texts. For example, to display this:See all books on wishlistThe text to be translated would be something like:See all books on <a href=”person_wishlist.php?all_d=1&pid=35&”>wishlist</a>
Problem is, if the stuff inside the <a> tag is copied wrongly during translation, the link will not work properly for that particular language, and the mistake will be difficult to debug.
To fix them, we are now taking off our translation platform for an upgrade. It’ll be back in a couple days. Stay tuned!
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