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Goodreads, the social network for reading and reviewing books, had to make a change this month. It moved away from its main source of book data, the Amazon Product Advertising API, citing its "many restrictions." It completed the transition to Ingram Book Company's data today, and it also draws from other open data sources such as libraries. The transition went smoothly, but Goodreads did lose some data. "Fewer than 2% of our 7 million users have books currently affected," Goodreads says.

The problem most visible to users will be missing cover images. Goodreads is in the process of uploading replacements. One percent of Goodreads books will appear blank, listed as "Unknown Title" and "Unknown Author," while Goodreads looks for a new data source for them. There's a great lesson here about building a business on top of a competitor's API, but Goodreads has made the switch in the nick of time.

German science, technology and medical publisher Springer Science+Business Media, will digitize its entire catalog of books back to 1840 by the end of the coming year, including works by Einstein, Niels Bohr and Sir John Eccles and Rudolf Diesel. (Yes, that Rudolf Diesel.)

The books, 70% of which are in English and nearly 30% in German, will total 65,000 titles when the project is finished.

Amazon threw down the gauntlet against terrestrial competitors today by announcing that Kindle and Kindle app customers can borrow and purchase Kindle books from more than 11,000 local libraries in the United States.

In essence, these first 11,000 local libraries just became a chain of local bookstores for Amazon's catalog of virtual books.

Goodreads, a social network that lets readers rate and review books, has launched a recommendation engine designed to help users choose what to read next.

The new feature comes six months after the startup acquired Discovereads, a book recommendation engine which is something CEO Otis Chandler cited as a sought-after feature among Goodreads users.

CoverCake, a service that tracks online conversations about books, is launching a new Web-based dashboard app tomorrow, turning its vast library of data into an analytics tool for publishers, authors and fans alike. The new analytics features will enable publishers and authors to measure the impact of promotion, publicity and social media campaigns by seeing the conversations they generate.

Paulo Coelho is one of the most successful fiction writers today and he actively uses social media to engage with his readers. For the past 25 years the Brazilian author has written many inspirational books, which have garnered him a huge fan base all around the world.

I recently discovered Coelho's writing and have been busy devouring his books ever since. I've also been checking out his online presence, which is based around 3 main platforms: blogging, Facebook and Twitter. Writers and publishers can learn a few tricks from how Paulo Coelho uses social media.

B&N's Nook Color e-reader is receiving a major update today which brings a wider selection of Android apps to the tablet, plus an email client, faster Web browsing and support for Adobe Flash and Adobe AIR technologies.

The update will also deliver an upgrade to the tablet's base operating system, bringing it a newer version of Android - Android 2.2, code-named "Froyo." While this is not the most current version of Android available at present, it's less of a concern here because the tablet runs its own user interface designed specifically for e-reading.

As high performance languages and frameworks like Node.js and Scala become more popular, is it even worth learning a seemingly old school language like PHP? Considering the persistent demand for PHP developers, and the fact that the language is in use as sites like Facebook and Wikipedia, I'd say so. ChartBoost recently posted an article called "Running a Modern Startup on PHP" on its blog.

Furthermore, popular platforms like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are all based on PHP. If you want to want to customize these applications, or build plugins, you'll need to know PHP. And though you don't have to build Facebook applications with PHP, it's helpful know it when developing on that platform anyway.

Here are some resources to help get you started.

Ruby may have lost some of its shine in recent months to JavaScript and Node.js, but it's still one of the most popular programming languages out there, and it's still growing.

There are a large number of beginner's Ruby resources out there, and the material is diverse. Here are a few places to get started.

OK, we won't bore you by telling you what Node.js is again or why it's so dang hot.

You want to learn Node.js? There's no completely finished Node.js book out there that we're aware of. But there's one complete book in rough draft form, two partial guides and several other great resources for learning Node.js.