I have quite a lot of books. I am not a book hoarder, I quite often do purges of books I don’t intend to read again, but my bookcases are always overflowing. I have tried various methods of keeping track of what I have read, but nothing really seemed that useful.
A friend at work just hipped me to LibraryThing, a website that seems tailor made for people like me. It is a little like a book-oriented facebook – you join and set up a profile (here is mine) and then start adding books. Books you have added can be given ratings and keywords, you can even write reviews if you are really keen. Once you have registered a few books, LibraryThing starts recommending other books you might like.
The website works pretty well for something claiming to be a beta. It is very text-heavy, but I don’t think that will be a problem for its target audience. The one thing that could be smoother is the interface for actually adding books – at the moment it is a bit of a pain to add multiple books by the same author, even if they appear together in the search.
In true Web2.0 fashion, LibraryThing offers all sorts of RSS feeds and blog widgets to publish data to other sites. As an experiment, I have added the LibraryThing widget to my blog theme. You should be able to see a random selection of books I have read to the right. I removed this, unfortunately it doesn’t work very well with my theme.
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That does look interesting – kinda like last.fm but for books. Now if only they could install some form of scrobbling client into your eyes to automatically track what you’re reading…
A while ago I tried using Delicious Library, a piece of Mac software to track books. I didn’t like it as much as LibraryThing but it had one really neat feature : you could (in theory) input books at great speed by presenting the bar code to the iSight camera. The scanning worked great, but none of the NZ editions of books were in its database.
Is that a photo of a tapir on your profile page???!
Yes.
It is one of the standard pictures, because I am too lazy to upload one of my own.