LibraryThing
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Dec 292006
I just dug into LibraryThing a little bit. I am sorely tempted to spend the $25 on a lifetime membership. I maxed out the free 200 book entries already by just tossing the first few hundred items in my Amazon “purchased” list at it. (Turns out that I have bought 1209 individual items from Amazon. I had never checked that number before. Hmm. Then again, I have been doing all my Xmas shopping on Amazon for years).
Anyway, here’s my profile, and my catalog is here, based on that very limited sample. Gee, I’m even tempted to buy the CueCat they sell so I can scan the books here. 😛
7 Responses to “LibraryThing”
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Raph pointed out LibraryThing.com today Raph covers the basics. Kim and I have so many books cluttering up the house and in storage, it’s hard to believe. Apparently, we don’t shop on amazon.com enough, as I only pulled up about 50 books from my account (and some it duplicated 6 times).
Have a look at booktribes was on mashable yesterday and is pretty similar to librarything, although not sure how it would cope with a LOT of books in your library … it is free though 🙂
Library Thing is cool. Tim came and gave a talk at OCLC, my day-gig joint. Tim’s a very, very cool dude.
[pimp on] If you like library stuff, check out http://www.worldcat.org. Search engine for more than 1 billion items in 10,000+ libraries worldwide. And if you want, you can put the WorldCat search-box on your own site/blog. One of the guys on my team did quite a lot of the design work for the site design and UI, so… well… props to the crew.[/pimp off]
I guess the curmudgeon in me just has to ask… why?
You pay someone for a tool to catalogue your library – OK, I can see that, although other alternatives are available (like a spreadsheet or database). But all this “tagging” nonsense – creating content for no compensation so that others can make money from that effort? And a virtual shelf? When I can just sit in my library?
Actually, I’m grateful you raised this topic, since I obviously have no clue why people would do all this. I’m happy people are reading, but all of this seems so… manipulative.
I did some contract work for LibraryThing.com a while back (well over a year ago now) and they really have come a long way. The really weird part is that I only just started actually playing with it in depth YESTERDAY.. then found this post! My collection does even come close to touching 1k books though. I ended up recommending it to my girlfriend who has been having trouble finding new books to read that she might find interesting.
Klingsor, in my case it’d be useful for several reasons:
– insurance purposes; we have many thousands of books and don’t have a clear picture of what they all are.
– recommendations. Especially on the non-fiction front.
– completing collections. I’ve got lots of cases where I have some but not all of a series or an author.
– I’m actually quite interested in the stats that it offers. Yes, I could get these some other way, but the automatic lookup of data is quite nice
Thanks for this Raph, very useful. Added my puny library to it but this has all the right signs to be the next big thing in the web/web 2.0 space.