Thursday, January 10, 2008

LibraryThing.com Part 2

I have books.
Lots of books.
Lots and Lots and Lots of books.
I checked and the only room in my house that does not have books in it is the dining room.
(Yes, there are books in both of the bathrooms.)
I have tried numerous ways of keeping track of what I have, from notebooks to index cards to spreadsheets to FileMaker databases.
And then I found LibraryThing.com

LibraryThing allows you to enter your books into their database using either the title or the ISBN.
They pull data from Amazon.com, the Library of Congress, Oxford University and over 200 more libraries around the world.
The British Library was just added on January 9th!
You can enter your own books manually if LibraryThing can't find a source for your particular book.
Every book can have "Tags" added to it like nonfiction, Poirot, not read, or anything else.
Once you have entered books, LibraryThing can compare your collection to everyone else's showing you how popular a book is or whose library is most similar to yours.
It has both a "Suggester" to find books you might like and an "Unsuggester" to find books that will probably not be in your library.
People have currently added over 22 million books into the system!

It's fun poking around the site because they keep adding new features.
Most owned book: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (26,381)
Most reviewed book: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (550 reviews)
There are authors who are staring to post their libraries on LibraryThing.
Even Thomas Jefferson, our third president has his library posted on LibraryThing!

I changed my LibraryThing sidebars so now you see 6 random books plus the last 6 books I entered.
(Can you tell I was bored in the hotel last night???)

2 comments:

moml said...

I remember we were in a motel room on a trip and you were about 3 years old. All of a sudden you said Mom, there are no words in this room.
I guess you were always surrounded by books.
It is a good thing.

mom

stampinkitty said...

Hey sweetie! The dining room DOES have a book! A book about tea ... in the china cabinet!
bhhaaaa!!!!