The last couple of days I’ve started playing around with LibraryThing, a site that lets you catalog your books online. You can share your library with other users, tag books with whatever description makes sense to you, and see what you have in common with other book fans.
You can enter books by ISBN, author name, or title.
It’s free to dork around and add up to 200 books – I’m only up to 80 at the moment – and costs $10 for unlimited capacity.
Note: I’m not affiliated with the site in any way, other than using it.
This looks pretty cool, but what happens when the site goes down?
I spent several days entering my books (almost 1200) into a similar program (singlefile) but then the site owners closed up shop. There was no way to transfer the data.
I’ve been reluctant to do it again, unless there’s a way to move the info elsewhere, like Access or Excel.
What do I get out of it? At the moment, it was fun to spend 30 minutes throwing in book titles from my library and seeing how it compares to others in the system. Will I pay $10 and go past 200? Dunno. I like playing with tags. We’ll see how much.
It’s Flickr for books. Obviously, the concept floats some people’s boats – I found the link at Language Hatp, and he’s got over 1500 books cataloged.
Maybe it’s just a generational thing but I can’t comprehend why I would let anybody know what books I owned, let alone the whole world. Then again, I can’t imagine ever posting on Flickr either.
I’m truly baffled by this concept. That’s why I’m asking what you get out of it. I honestly don’t understand, but would like to.
I can’t answer for Interrobang!, but the reason I catalogued my books was because the program was fun to use. Enter the ISBN and up pops the book, with a picture of the cover, publication date, number of pages, etc. It linked to similar books and authors at Amazon too, and periodically I’d go through the list and put stuff up for sale.
Also, I was accidentally buying books that I already owned, and making a list helped refresh my memory about what I had.
I didn’t share the data with anyone, but I could have.
Doesn’t anyone else play with their books? Rearrange shelves and stuff? It’s like that.
Well sure I have my collection cataloged on my computer. What I don’t understand is why you would do it in such a way that other people could log in and view it and compare who owns what. Anybody at all.
I tried it, but it didn’t collect all the information I needed, and a lot of my books are pre-ISBN. So, not interested.
Before kids interrupted I had all my books indexed on cards, and also had all the short stories indexed - a big help in figuring out if you’ve read stories in an anthology already. I’ve got the Day, Metcalfe and NESFA indices, but there are no really good anthology indexes - or weren’t in the pre-Web days when I did this.
I’m reentering the books on my computer, using an old Star Office db which exports to a spreadsheet. I’m up to 2,000, and haven’t begun the magazines and hardcovers yet. I’ll think I’ll hit 6,000. That’s sf books only - I have no desire to index all our other books.
But it still isn’t as good as Forry Ackerman’s collection or the MITSFS collection. sniff
Well, I gave it a try and got hooked. I put in the 262 books I have in the apartment, now I’ll go back and add tags and comments. I don’t see any real point to it, but it’s fun as hell to see who has the same books as I do and if they posted reviews of them. And I can’t imagine why I would care that anyone who wants to can see what I have. Anyway, if anybody cares, here’s my profile and my catalog. Yeah, I’ve got a bunch more books but they’re in storage at the moment.
Good lord. I have no idea how many books I have – several thousand, certainly – even without Pepper Mill’s and MilliCal’s libraries thrown in. But I couldn’t imagine cataloging them – that would be like having another job. And I can’t see the point of gataloging them online. That seems an invitation to book moochers, and maybe thieves.
I have over 1500+ Sci-fi/Fantasy
Over 500+ reference books
Over 250+ childrens books
50+ sports books
80+ computer books
200+ fiction books not Sci-fi/fantasy
30 AD&D books
30 Hardy boys/Nancy Drews
100 very bad Perry Rhodan books
20 Cook books.
35 Comics books (as in Bloom County, Doonesbury, Calvin & Hobbes and Foxtrot)
I am closing in on 3000 books.
I have book shelves in 6 different rooms. They are an entire fllor to ceiling wall in my Bedroom & Living Room. My office has shelves on 2 walls for books and computer parts/software.
For me the attraction is that it is extremely easy to find the exact book you have (e.g., publisher, year etc…) as you can search, among other places, Amazon and the LOC. Then you can export your entire collection, and if something, god forbid, happens to your books, all is not lost. You have a record of them. Compared to manually copying down the metadata for your large collection, I would estimate a 10/15 to 1 time savings. Plus they’ve been adding features like mad
