Tar Heel Reader

Yesterday we passed 3 million books read at Tar Heel Reader. It’s been 305 days since we hit 2 million on 11 February.

We’re now at 170 “countries” (in quotes because these are guessed from the IP address). We’ve added Burkina Faso, Comoros, Djibouti, Dominica, Faroe Islands, French Polynesia, Greenland, Guernsey, Isle Of Man, Liechtenstein, Mauritius, Myanmar, Nepal, Senegal, Solomon Islands, Togo, Uganda, and Vatican State.

The most read books are almost the same except “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” has rocketed up the charts to number 3. It was written in May of this year! It will take over number 2 in the next few days.

Comments were split between 99% spam and 1% requests for the registration code so I’ve turned them off. You can get the access code by sending email to tarheelreader@cs.unc.edu as directed in the FAQ.

On Friday 11 February 2011 Tar Heel Reader simultaneously hit two amazing milestones: two million books read and 1000 days online! Since we started in May of 2008 the site has been visited nearly 300,000 times by over 100,000 different computers in 150 countries and all 50 states.

This map shows where books have been read.

The countries with the most books read are:

1. United States 1,709,424
2. Canada 104,162
3. Australia 61,773
4. Germany 47,880
5. Great Britain 16,611
6. New Zealand 12,502
7. Spain 9,852
8. Korea 7,270
9. Italy 5,398
10. Brazil 2,417

Over 3800 authors have written nearly 15,000 books in 15 languages (Arabic, Basque, Danish, English, Filipino, French, Galician, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish).

The top 10 most read books on the site are:

1. Declensions
2. Our First Black President
3. The ABC Book
4. Lady Gaga
5. The ABC Book (yes there are two ABC books at the top of the list)
6. I am Michael Jordan
7. Disney Princesses
8. Three Little Kittens
9. Cupcakes
10. Silly Bands (This is the currently the hottest book rising to number 10 in only 37 days.)

Several users have reported problems with not being able to find pictures while writing a book. We use Flickr (a giant on-line picture web site) for images and when they have problems, we inherit them. I understand they are working on the problem and hope to fix it soon.

Until they get it fixed you may experience problems trying to find pictures when writing new books.

Tar Heel Reader now has partial support for reading books out loud on the iPad/iPod Touch/iPhone. You have to touch the text or picture on the page to hear it because of a #@%#@! rule imposed by Apple. When we do version 2 of the site we’ll fix things up so that pages are read automatically.

Enjoy!

Starting about 11:30 24 May 2010 the PowerPoint download facility of Tar Heel Reader failed. It seems to be working again. Thanks to Patrick for reporting it. All, when you see it problem, let me know.

Today we passed 10,000 books at Tar Heel Reader! I remember when we passed 1000.

As of today we have books in 12 languages. They have been read over 1.2 million times in 137 countries.

The movie below shows the distribution of Tar Heel Readers across the world from the start back in May 2008 until we passed 1,000,000 books read at about noon on March 3rd, 2010.

The pitch you hear reflects the rate that books were read day by day. Listen for the pitch to go down during the summer and at Christmas. The regular structure in the notes is caused by the drop in reading on the weekend. The pitch is too low to be heard near the beginning of the movie.

Congratulations to all you Tar Heel Readers who read all these books!

Books have been read in 133 countries and all 50 US states. We have books in 12 languages. Over 25,000 books are currently being read each week. Over 100 new books are added each week. The geolocation data provided by Info Sniper Geolocation Service.

The site has been slowing under the load of ever more books and users so I’ve made a few changes to help speed things up.
First, you may notice that the counts have been removed from the links in the sidebar. It turns out that producing those is very expensive, almost doubling the time to generate each page.
Second, you’ll notice that books written in English now have an English tag. This greatly speeds up showing English-only books. I think I’ve got things setup to make it provide the English tag by default so you should not have to type it in yourself.
I’m working on a new version of the site that will have provide new features and better performance but that is taking longer than I’d hoped and I’ve got other projects that require my attention. Maybe in the summer…

The site crashed about 2:30pm on 24 November. We had a report of problems writing books earlier in the day. Perhaps these were related. The site was down for about 1/2 hour but now appears to be working fine.

We apologize for the inconvenience. We are working to improve the software to support the growing load.

Something began happening this morning about 9:30AM EDT that caused the system to slow way down and finally I had to reboot it to put it out of its misery. It’s back now. I’m trying to track down what went wrong. I apologize to any of you who lost work. As when using any computer application save early and often.

Update: It appears we were attacked by a computer whose IP address maps back to a school in Ga. I’m trying to follow up with their IT people to see what is up. In the meantime they are being blocked by our firewall.

You should be able to search for tags, authors, etc. now.

We were having some problems with the search facility on Tar Heel Reader so I have made some changes. Performance should be better but we have temporarily lost the ability to search by author name. I hope to get it working again soon.

Today I enabled a new feature at Tar Heel Reader. When you select a language in the Books By Language list in the right column you will only see books for that language as you select other categories until you select another language. Your language selection is “sticky” in that it “sticks” after you select it. This is indicated by a little dot and underline on the selected language and the name of the language appears in the title for the page.

For example, if you select the English language link you’ll see the Books category with only English books shown (actually only books not tagged with another language the site recognizes). Then if you select Reviewed Books, you see only English books that are reviewed. Likewise for any of the other languages on the site.

To return to see all languages simply select the All link in the languages list.

As always let me know of bugs you find on the site. I don’t know about problems unless you tell me.

I know of one limitation. The search does properly restrict itself to only books in the current language. I’ll work on that when I get a chance.

Yesterday we passed the 1/2 million mark for books read at Tar Heel Reader. These books have been read in 109 countries. I’m excited and pleased to be part of such a successful project.

We are approaching 5000 books on the site (4937 as I write this). Thank you to all the authors who have contributed your work.

The top ten countries in number of books read are:

1. USA
2. Canada
3. Australia
4. Germany
5. Great Britain
6. New Zealand
7. Korea
8. Spain
9. Italy
10. Japan

You can learn more about where our readers are and see them on a world map here.

Penny suggested that we should add the Flickr Commons pictures to the search in the book writing wizard here at Tar Heel Reader. That category didn’t exist back when I was writing that part of the code (or at least I didn’t see it). It turns out the addition was trivial. So now your searches will include the huge collection of pictures with no known copyright. Check out the Flickr Commons page for the the list of institutions participating. Thanks Penny for a great suggestion.

Laura reported a bug in the writing wizard when using Internet Explorer 8. I think I have fixed it.

Everyone, let us know when you see problems.

Dr. Gretchen Hanser of the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies and I are planning to make changes to the keyboard controls for reading books at Tar Heel Reader. These changes will enable 3-switch scanning and direct access while still supporting the 2-switch scanning compromise we have in place now.

Currently the site uses right arrow (and down arrow, page down, space, N) as the mover and left arrow (and up arrow, page up, back space, enter, P) as a chooser on choice pages (Favorites, and menus like What would you like to do now?) and as go back when reading a book.

The new scheme leaves left arrow as it was but it changes up arrow to always mean previous selection. The other change is that down arrow is always a chooser. With this change a 3-switch user can use right arrow to always mean next selection, up arrow to always mean previous selection and down arrow to always mean choose.

We hope these changes will have minimum impact on our switch users. If you happen to be using down arrow instead of right arrow as your mover, you may need to change your setup. Gretchen will be glad to help anyone who has problems adapting their switch setup.

To summarize, here are the keyboard controls for each kind of page on the site:

We have also implemented keys for direct access to the choices on the various Choice pages. The direct access keys are:

Gretchen has made overlays for the Intellikeys keyboard to implement 2-switch, 3-switch, and direct access.

Let us know if you see problems with these changes. We plan to implement them on the site next weekend.