An Interview with Tim Spaulding, CEO and Founder of LibraryThing.com

Photographers have Flickr. Voyeurs have YouTube. And for the past 3 years bibliophiles have had LibraryThing.com.

This book-sharing site first blasted into the Web on August 29, 2005. Here, the booklover, can catalogue his own library, connect with others, who, unbelievably might have the same books as theirs. They can also tag their books the same way Flickr users tag their photos. Reviews and ratings are encouraged and help the reader enlarge their book fetish.

LibraryThing was listed as one of the top 5 services by PC Magazine in 2006 and Book World called it "one of the Seven Wonders of the Web." These accolades were a pleasant surprise to Tim Spaulding, CEO and Founder of LibraryThing. He would have never foreseen, for example, book czar Abebooks buying 40% of LibraryThing in June of 2006.

Tim Spaulding, founder of LibraryThing recently answered questions about the road to the inception of LibraryThing, his own personal pride, and the future of his site, the Web, and our world. Here's what he said:

ABS: Was Library Thing a light bulb moment - an epiphany? Or did it develop slowly?

TS: I had had the idea some time before, but very much as a fun project, not a company. And it has always been fluid. When I first opened LibraryThing, after three weeks of programming, it did little more than catalog books. There were some other aps out there that did that, but only with Amazon. LibraryThing's first improvement was to be into library data.

I soon saw that the social aspects would also be interesting. Features along the way have developed in fits and starts of creativity. Features like collaborative cataloging, user driven author and work disambiguation, swap and bookstore integration and Library Thing's "talk" feature may have been individually creative, but they emerged from a project I have always considered "clay" not "sculpture". I avoid plans, boxes and arrows, wire frames, schemas, and so forth.

ABS: What obstacles stood in your way as you went about developing the site?

TS: Time. My biggest development obstacle was and remains meager knowledge of the UNIX fundamentals. I also started out with limited MySQL chops. I got those quick.

ABS: Who helped you get the site off the ground?

TS: Nobody. Booklovers.

ABS: How did you get from there to here?

TS: I was born on March 29, 1971. I was raised in Cambridge, MA and went to Georgetown for my B.A. in History and Classics. I worked for a few years at Houghton, Miffin, a Boston publisher, managing and creating software to support their publications. I was a freelance web developer and SEO specialist for a while after that, from which I stumbled into LibraryThing. My wife, Lisa Carrey is a novelist, who wrote, "The Mermaids Singing" and " Every Visible Thing" and we live in Portland, ME with my 11 month old son.

ABS: What other ideas or plans do you have for LibraryThing's future?

TS: There's a long list of "planned" improvements -better author support, better "shelf" display, better localization of LibraryThing 10+ international versions and so forth. We're also going to "wiki-up" pages in all sorts of ways. And I have publicly stated that we will get into movies and music some day.

But, I have a few surprises in store that I haven't talked about.

ABS: Do you see a day when electronic media outruns print?

TS: I think it's much more complex than that. Even the question may be wrong, like wondering if an automobile will ever win the Preakness. To my mind, the least interesting changes are the physical ones. Something is happening in culture now, spurred by digital media but not limited to digitization and certainly way beyond "ebooks". I'm talking about the things like the radical explosion and transformation of personal expression, the emergence of new forms of social expression, and the speed of open legal frameworks and habits of mind. It's also important to keep in mind, as Donald Rumsfield says, the distinction between, "known unknowns and unknown unknowns." We're filling in the blanks on a form that keeps changing.

The change that's happening won't be total, and it won't be all good. But, something's going on, that's clear. What an exciting time to be alive!

ABS: Global! Tell me, what has been your proudest moment, ever?

TS: The birth of my son!

Tim Spaulding is a man of his times. He founded a company that has become an iconic part of the Web, and he looks towards the future with a candid, yet fascinated eye. What " unknown unknowns" will he bring us next?