LibraryThing’s Million Cover Giveaway
LibraryThing have followed the opening up of their Common Knowledge API with the A million free covers from LibraryThing announcement:
A few days ago, just before hitting thirty million books, we hit one million user-uploaded covers. So, we’ve decided to give them away—to libraries, to bookstores, to everyone.
Get yourself a LibraryThing Developer Key (any LibraryThing member can get one), and you can retrieve up to 1,000 covers per day. As they encourage local cashing of images, even this is not really a limit.
Tim Spalding openly admits that this service competes with Amazon web service, but LibraryThing’s Terms of Service are far more open it also competes with other commercial services (which are on average better) but without their costs.
The folks at LibraryThing have been promoting the open use of data for a long time, it is great to see them continuing to practice what they preach – lets hope their bandwidth can support this, as I can see it becoming very popular.
August 13th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
Quick note about the numbers. We’ve opened it up to 5,000 requests/day. In fact, you get MANY more than that. It only counts when the cover needs to be “made.” So if you show the same cover 100 times, that’s only one hit, and if someone else showed it earlier, that’s zero hits.