I mentioned Library Thing in a quicklinks post, but I hadn’t had time to fully investigate the site. Now I have, and this definitely merits its own entry.

Like all good geeks and smart people, we have a few thousand books sitting around the house. Most are in bookcases, a few are in piles, some are in storage. I have wanted to catalog these for a long time - in fact I think I originally wanted to catalog my mom’s books when I still lived at home, and she has a ton of books. (Not that I’ve weighed them, but it might be close!) Over the past several years I have tried various ways of cataloging them. Early attempts were made with software designed for collectors of all types; more recently I tried using Palm software like BookBag. The problem with both of these was that they were not connected to the web. For every single book, I had to record the title, author, ISBN, etc. - and this usually meant physically taking them off the shelf and looking at each one front and back. Needless to say, this was a pain in the ass!

Library Thing is a revolutionary leap forward in book cataloging. All you have to do is type in a search that Amazon would recognize, and you get a list of matching results. Click the title of the right book, and it’s quickly added to your list and your cursor is put back to the search field (Google-style). Type another title (author, ISBN, whatever), hit enter, click the right one, and repeat. Library Thing pulls in all the other data from Amazon, so your catalog is complete with authors and publishers and even publication dates. The absolute easiest way to use Library Thing is with a laptop and a wireless connection. I literally sat down in front of the bookshelf and fired in title after title. If you don’t have that kind of setup, I suggest taking good-quality photographs of each shelf/section and working from those. You may occasionally have to go fetch a book - sometimes it can’t find the right one when I search by author, but if I search by title it works, or vice-versa - but working from pictures would be the most efficient way to do this if you are tethered.

So, all this raving about Library Thing and I haven’t even gotten into the social aspect. Like most new web applications, you can make up your own tags. You can also view the catalogs of users with similar collections to yours, and view books others have tagged with a particular term. Oh, and there are watchlists - they’re not public knowledge like a friends list, but you can keep an eye on the catalogs of others. You can also get recommendations of books you might like, import from a few different formats, export to CSV (very nice to have that), make a blog widget with your favorite/recent/random books, leave public or private comments on the profiles of other readers…and probably even more stuff that I haven’t found yet.

So, have I convinced you to sign up for Library Thing yet? (No, that’s not an affiliate link!) If you want to see somebody’s catalog, why not take a look at mine? It’s probably only about 5% of the books I actually have, and it’s heavy on queer and deaf stuff because I had already cataloged that elsewhere, but I’ll be adding more soon!