Dangling Conversations

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Library Thing

Posted 16 Sep, 2005 at 09:33 by wendy in /Books | Permanent link

I know that at least one of you has put together a catalogue of all your books. Now someone has built LibraryThing to let you keep your catalogue online. Even better, instead of entering all the book info manually, you can use search terms and it will search Library of Congress as well as Amazon (and a few others I think), then let you select the book you're referring to from the search results. Or you can enter the info manually. You can set your catalogue to be public or private, so your friends can find out what books you have. Add comments so you know if you liked something or not...or add a comment that it's currently on loan to a friend.

I suspect I'm going to be using this...they let you enter 200 books free, then there's a $10 fee for a lifetime membership which seems really quite reasonable, you'd pay more than that for software which would have less functionality.

Comments (5 comments so far)
This is pretty cool. But then again, since most people here collect music at least as (in some cases more) prolifically than books, they may find this program which does both more useful. It's called Readerware, and while it is a bit more expensive, it has slightly more functionality. Also, for a short time you can get a Cat-scanner with it ;)

It's been hinted to me that there is a bar code reader you can hook into your palm too.

Posted 2005/9/16 13:36:02 by
Maybe a suggestion for a future enhancement.... don't allow the 'Name' field on replies to be null. I think all of us have fallen for that now at least once.
Posted 2005/9/16 13:36:51 by Blue
Checking out the author cloud. It's a collection of author tags sized according to their frequency. (classic Flik'r style) The more users who catalog an author’s books, the larger their name is on the list. Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling’s names can be read several yards away from your monitor.
Posted 2005/9/16 13:41:09 by Blue
There a Linux application called Alexandria that does a similar thing. Besides Library of Congress, you can also get information from the British Library, Amazon.com, and several European state libraries. And Delicious Library http://www.delicious-monster.com/ And Bookster http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/13669 All that aside... LibraryThing is Cool! ;)
Posted 2005/9/16 13:47:09 by Blue
(The developer.) There certainly are some good cataloging programs out there. Readerware is good and the Mac program Delicious Library is great (I've never tried Alexandria). What's different with LibraryThing is that it's on the *web*. You can access the data from anywhere. The web also opens up all sorts of social possibilities: you can share your library with others; you can find people who share a lot of your tastes, etc. Desktop programs can't do that. It's the difference between a paper diary and a blog...
Posted 2005/9/27 23:02:24 by Tim
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