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24th June 2006

Library Thing – the best website ever!



Categories : Cool, Internet, Links, Personal, books |

bookpile.jpgAs you may know I’m quite an avid reader and collector of books, my shelves being full of books, many of which I haven’t had a chance to read yet. And I’m also a bit of an internet geek. Now here’s a way of combing the two – Library Thing! This is arguably the best thing I have come across on the internet .. ever. It’s basically an online catalog of the books in your library, drawing data from Amazon and a host of world libraries. Now I’ve tried similar things before but this is light years ahead. Adding and tagging books is very easy – it usually finds what I’m looking for right away. The feature that really won me over was the ability to import from your amazon order history – that way all the books I’ve bought from them in the last few years were added almost automatically (though it did take a few hours of waiting in their “queue”)

Like most of the new generation of websites, Librarything is big on tagging and using tags to connect you with other people with similar interests/book collections. It will also generate book recommendations. One cool feature is the Zeitgeist page which basically has a huge range of interesting lists of popular books, tags, authors, ratings, and users. I even crack a mention on there today as number 5 (currently) in the ‘books added in the last 24 hours’ section.

So far I’ve added 363 books which is comprised of all my amazon purchases and plenty of others, but I still have a lot of work to do to get my whole library into it. Playing with this site is already proving to be an unhealthy addiction – not only working on my own library but browsing around others. There are ways of including it in your blog through sidebar widgets and rss which I’ll look at in the next few days when I get a chance.

In the meantime, feel free to browse the beginnings of my library - be sure to try the ‘graphical shelf’ view which is pretty cool. There are plenty more books to come but this represents a sizeable portion of my collection. If you know me in real life and want to borrow something, just give me a call.  And if you’re a book lover yourself, why not sign up and start cataloguing too? :)

PS – here’s a challenge to you – see if you can work out which of the books in the bookpile image above I actually have in my library…. I’ll give you a clue – it’s not The Lusty Lady… :P

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 24th, 2006 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Cool, Internet, Links, Personal, books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 26 responses to “Library Thing – the best website ever!”

Why not let us know what you think by adding your own comment! Your opinion is as valid as anyone elses, so come on... let us know what you think.

  1. 1 On June 26th, 2006, Cam said:

    …and your top 5 out of that list?

  2. 2 On June 26th, 2006, Baggas said:

    Top 5?
    You set me a virtually impossible task there Cam.

    However if you want a rough idea just look at the books I’ve rated 5 stars (though the rating is far from complete – as is the cataloguing – I’m about 2/3 of the way through my books at the moment…)

  3. 3 On June 26th, 2006, Baggas’ Blog - Paul’s blog on life, medicine, faith, technology and much more… » Old books said:

    [...] Library Thing – the best website ever! [...]

  4. 4 On June 26th, 2006, Matthew said:

    Paul,

    How did you find Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt by Anne Rice?

    I was curious to read that one, being a huge Anne Rice fan. Naturally, this is quite a departure from her usual works.

  5. 5 On June 26th, 2006, baggas said:

    Hey Matt – I got that off Amazon.com, where I get most of my books. It’s well worth reading – a unique book of which I’ve never seen the like. Definitely check it out if you like Anne Rice or Jesus or both :)
    I believe she is intending to only write religious stuff from now on. I recently listened to an interesting interview with her here which is worth checking out.

  6. 6 On June 27th, 2006, Jenny said:

    Hi Paul
    What a great site, thank you for the referral. Now all I need is a barcode scanner or a voice recognition program, as it will take me ages to type in all my books!

  7. 7 On June 27th, 2006, Baggas said:

    Hi Jenny. A barcode scanner is a great idea – would speed up the process somewhat. Even so, it’s not too hard to just enter ISBNs manually – just do them 10 or 20 at a time and you’ll slowly get there. I cheated a bit since over 200 of my books were in my Amazon purchase history so I was able to import them automatically. Let me know if you get your collection online – one of he fun things about this is browsing other people’s libraries.

  8. 8 On May 5th, 2008, Baby Stuff said:

    Thats one of the best things since sliced bread.
    The zeitgeist feature thingy sure yields some interesting results.

    thanks for writing about that website, I doubt I would have found it without ur post :)

    Cheers
    Robert

  9. 9 On April 3rd, 2009, Samantha said:

    I didn’t realise Anne Rice was writing religious works?

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