Anyone Ever Use LibraryThing?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve got enough books that if my apartment ever burned, I’d rather throw myself into the flames than try to replace them all. It’s high time to catalogue my little soldiers. I’m not a rare book collector or anything, but the majority of my collection are expensive university press types of books. More arrive every week.

A little hunting around suggests that LibraryThing is a pretty solid tool, but I’d love to get the opinions of people who have catalogued their own libraries or are, better yet, librarians. What tools work well? Is there anything I should watch out for? I don’t mind paying for a service (LibraryThing’s $25 lifetime fee is certainly modest enough). Don’t let my collection go down in flames!

2

I prefer Goodreads and it’s free which is a huge plus.

3

Does Goodreads give you the option of making a separate “I own” collection? It looks like it’s based around what you’ve read and what you want to read next.

4

The default exclusive shelves are “read”, “to-read” and “currently-reading”, but you can add your own exclusive shelves, so you could create one for “I-own”.

I used LibraryThing for a little while, but I prefer Goodreads.

5

Anybody have anything to add? I used Librarything for a while but quit…

  1. Many books had multiple entries to choose from and I grew frustrated trying to pick the one that was most detailed and accurate

  2. I never figured out how to tag and sort

  3. I don’t think it even had the ability to print reports

If you can relate to the above… has it gotten better lately??

Is there other softare you would recommend.

6

I bought a “lifetime” account. I haven’t logged into it in several years. I just can’t make myself care that much about what books I do and don’t have…

They used to sell a little gadget called a CueCat that would read the bar code on a book and fill in the information. If you have so very many books, I bet that’s the only way to catalogue them and stay sane. It cost less than $20 back then.

7

I think most modern smart phones (iPhone 4 and later) can scan barcodes through the camera; no need to buy a separate gadget. Unfortunately, I have an iPhone 3…

8

I like it mostly for the recommendations and discussions which point me to new books to read.

Give it a try - and BTW while it says it costs $10 a year, if you pay anything ($1) you’re good to go.

9

(Hope this isn’t a hijack). I have lots of books that are too old to have barcodes but new enough to have Library of Congress Card Numbers. I’d like to be able to just key in the LCCN and have some software somewhere retrieve rudimentary records for all of those. Not full MARC records but name-author-date. I know I could do it one at a time on the LC website, but there must be an automated way for folks other than libraries to do this.

10

So they don’t have ISBN numbers at all? I recently cataloged all my books using a different app (Book Crawler) and there was no input for LC numbers. (I only had a handful of books that didn’t have ISBN but did have LC numbers. Usually it was all or nothing.)

The app did, however, pull up a rudimentary record (Google Book record) pretty easily just by title, although some of the publisher info and dates were hit or miss.

11

I must have been using the free version as I don’t think I ever paid anything. Maybe the full version will do what I want.

12

Any iPhone, Android Phone or Windows 7 phone can do it as long as the can download apps - I prefer red laser as you don’t need to press a button just keep scanning and it picks up all the barcodes.

If you have a mac something like delicious library is nice.