Library Thing - the best website ever!
Categories : Cool, Internet, Links, Personal, books |
As 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… 
