Global book map based on Library Thing data

I am the creator of this book map: www.mappit.net/bookmap

It uses Library Thing common knowledge data. This seems like the ideal group to ask for feedback. I would love to know what you think of it and how it can be improved.

OK, that's pretty cool.

I would like having metrics other than popularity. My favorite would be awarded books or authors, like winners of major prizes like the Nobel, Pulitzer, Man Booker, Prince of Asturias, etc. But highly rated is also a good metric.

Also, would like being able to separate out books by local authors from the larger mass. Like it's sort of interesting that the Far Side is popular in Iceland, but I'd really like to get more Icelandic authors high on the list.

A small bug - it doesn't look like there is a national marker for Norway. I have an upcoming trip to Iceland and Norway and went to check them out. When I zoomed in, there were regional ones within Norway, but I wasn't get the national one.

Thanks A_musing. Feedback much appreciated.

Sorting to show books with awards is possible and I will look into how to implement that. The data doesn't suport author nationality and book rating so those are a bit tricky.

'Popular Books' is a bit ambiguous and I've changed that. It's sorting the list by the number of times books have been viewed by map users.

Norway issue fixed. The marker was hiding on Svalbard.

That is awesome! Thank you very much for sharing.

Hi A-musing, I have taken the book ratings and sorted books high-low based on rating. The data isn't perfect but it should do a reasonable job of showing better books at the top of the list. I will include awards and prizes in the future.

I have a problem with books that are trivially tagged to loads of different locations - for example "The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd" by Richard Zacks is linked to 24 different locations but the link with most locations is very weak.

Do these need to be removed do you think? Or demoted to the bottom of the list? Or left as they are?

Thanks to everyone who checked out the map.

Good stuff. I think that makes it more interesting. The Zacks of the world are the kind of stuff it's good to weed out (maybe an algorithm that only focuses on top three locations for any book?), but I'm not sure that would be the highest priority for improvements. I just checked out a few places I'll be traveling soon, and it gave an interesting set of books quickly for each place. cool.

Yes, very nice!
It's the sort of thing where you tend to assume that the data will never be good enough to be really interesting, but actually it does seem to bring up both the most obvious books I'd expect for each place I tried and a few I wouldn't necessarily have thought of. Maybe you could give a slightly lower relative score to books with a large number of locations, so that they appear, but not right at the top of the list.

It isn't obvious before you click on a spot whether it's going to turn out to be a town, a region, or a country - I don't know if it would be worth doing something there with shapes or colours or something?

Thanks for the positive comments.

I will look at ways to push books with lots of important places down the rankings - They may be interesting to someone.

At present the map shows countries when zoomed out, regions at medium zoom and towns/cities/individual features at high zoom levels although there are a few regions that manage to sneak in at high zooms (particularly in the UK).

I'm working on the cartography now - I initially used the border outlines of different regions and countries however most devices/browsers struggle to draw that many vector lines on the screen so I had to default to these rather boring points but I agree that the symbology and use of colour needs improvement.

I made changes to the ranking algorithm, books with too many places are now demoted. I think it has improved the quality of results a little bit. I've also started caching pages so everything loads a little faster. Still working on the symbology.

Any other suggestions for improvement?

Alex