LibraryThingTim

Yeah. That's what I'm going with. It strikes a balance. Thanks!

5/ The website personal recommendations is one of the few places we've gone with identically-sized images, with cropping. The regularity of the display reduces cognitive load, when you're probably just skimming. But it's murder on picture books.

4/ * Picture books are all over the place.
* Travel guides (Michelin, Rick Steves) are one of the few consistently "thin" formats.

Across LibraryThing the median ratio is 0.67, the mean is 0.71.
* That median is trade paperbacks and trade hardcovers.
* Mass market paperbacks come in at around 0.62.
* Audiobook images are nearly all square now, to accommodate CDs, even now that the CDs are gone.

3/ The advantage of fixed height or hybrid is that most books are "book shaped." So it's really about how you deal with "Michelin-Guide tall" and "picture-book wide."

2/ In 20 years of this, I swear I have implemented every possible combination of options. And, fundamentally, there's no answer—different contexts require different solutions.

What's your favorite?

1/ When displaying a row of covers, you have a basic choice, arising for the fact the covers come in different aspect ratios:

1. Crop to a "book" size
2. Fixed width
3. Fixed height
4. Adopt a hybrid approach, with a fixed height or width unless the w-h ratio is too high, then do 1, 2 or 3

I’ve always been a one-monitor person—one big display, laptop as a occasional sidecar. Working on an iOS app—with two codebases and AI coding tools—is the first time I’ve wanted two full-size monitors.

Apple has a set of icons (SF Symbols) that come built in for iPhone development. Today I found out I can't legally use any of them in web development. So I can't make anything look the same app-to-web, unless I pivot to some third-party set, like Font Awesome. Shooting themselves in the foot here!

(I'm listening to Selin Geçit. No offense, but she is not good.)

Imagine if every Parisian spoke this way! Americans don't!

This conspires to make a lot of Turkish pop unrealistically accessible. My French is better than my Turkish, but when I listen to Turkish pop, even if I don't follow it, I could transcribe it flawlessly. There's no "Inna gadda da vida."

One glorious thing about Turkish: Educated Istanbul Turkish is uncannily clear, crisp and articulate. Impeccable vowel harmony, consonants never dropped. Even speed is generally good. It's like they're all conspiring to make language-learners as comfortable as possible.

medieval worlds • no. 23 • 2025 A truly sensational find is presented in volume 23 of Medieval Worlds: a newly discovered Christian world chronicle in Arabic, which Adrian C. Pirtea examines in a preliminary case study. We furthermo...

Links:
medievalworlds.net?arp=0x004102d6
science.orf.at/stories/3234...

Sensational: A newly-discovered early 8c Christian universal chronicle from St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai. Arabic translation of a Syriac original, from Creation to 634. Complete text. Looks like a new, partially independent source for Arab conquest, etc.

Surprising to me. Didn't he write every single hour of the day? (Producing a lot of crap, IMHO. His history of Byzantium is a legend in the field.)

With sorrow, we announce the passing of FOBAZI M. ETTARH 1989 - 2026. Fobazi changed so many lives with her friendship, love, and brilliance. She was so loved, and leaves behind a powerful legacy. We thank Fobazi's community for their support over the last several months of her illness. A private burial will be held for family. We will be in touch with further information about a future Celebration of Life event, as well as ways to support Fobazi's family and legacy.

It would be interesting to look at emojis as idiolects/familect. 🫕 means "I love you" (lit. I am fondue you) in my family. And 🕸️ means mesh, which is comes from being autocorrect for mwah. Anyone else?

I enjoyed using fondue as the cooking emoji. Underused emoji, except in my family, where it means "I love you" because my mom once gave me a "I am fondue you" card, and that phrase has stuck around.

The app is not highly graphical, but a few things are more so than the website.

So, did you grok that the images are emojis? (They're desaturated and rendered as duotones, and I tried to stay away from the best-known ones.)

First look: LIbraryThing genres on the app. Take a look; question in the next tweet.

Should say "screens." Old habits die hard.

First look: LibraryThing App "Your Books" pages.

Yeah, it's coming. Send coffee and donuts.

He was a real jerks—exist, racist and antisemitic in the opinion of and by the standards of his OWN time, not to mention ours. However, it's his system and he wrote the (pre-copyright) schedules we are using. Maybe someone should come up with a whole new system built for public libraries…

The Melvil Decimal System is based on the system of Melvil Dewey (today the Dewey Decimal System®), but the schedules are from pre-copyright editions of Dewey, with additional wordings from LibraryThing members. The "Dewmojis" are member-created. See www.librarything.com/mds

LibraryThing app first look: Melvil Decimal System

Icons from the Kijkwijzer DVD rating system, used in Belgium and the Netherlands. You've got to love the "sex" one.

MDS page www.librarything.com/mds/56X

Includes our "Dewmoji." Probably won't do that on mobile.