08 January 2008

LibraryThing

In my holidays, I discovered LibraryThing, which is a cross between a user-generated personal library cataloguing tool and a social networking site for book lovers. I then spent far too much time adding listings for books I own (or, in a few cases, don't own but have read). The worrying aspect of this is that I have 59 books listed in my library after my late-night efforts; many people have well upwards of 1000. You can list up to 200 books before having to pay to join, so I'll stealthily approach this limit and then decide whether I want to take my relationship with LibraryThing to the next level.

Every LT user gets a profile, and if you're an author, you can also have an author page. Since authors write books, and LT users enjoy and even buy books, creating an author profile makes sense to me - even if, with a name like Tim Jones, I will forever be embroiled in the toils of disambiguation.

Once you've loaded some of your books, there's plenty more to do - tagging the books, loading covers, giving ratings, and writing reviews (which seems to be one of the most pressing needs). And there's groups to be joined - "New Zealand Thingamabrarians", for example - and many wondrous highways and byways of literature to explore.

This is the sort of thing that only appeals to a certain personality type. But I have that personality type. You may have guessed that by now.

4 comments:

Mr. Nauton said...

welcome to LT -- I've found that after the novelty of adding my own books wore off, I still check LT to get ideas for new books, and now I'm surrounded by post-it notes and lists of titles and authors... somewhat addicting, but for a good cause...

thelifemosaic said...

I found your blog through the blog thread at LibraryThing; welcome aboard. I'm a (relatively) new user, too, and it gets pretty addicting. Keep writing! - Nate

Tim Jones said...

JK and Nate: Thanks! I have an addiction to staying up when I should be in bed, which LT feeds - "I'll just add one more book ..." - but I'm finding that it's sending me back to books I haven't read in ages, or bought and have never read - I think "I must catalogue that", closely followed by "I must read that"!

Harvey Molloy said...

Tim, thanks for putting me on to LibraryThing (I'm not sure about the name!); I'm going to join up late today. Cheers.