LibraryThing

LibraryThing Catalog your books online is a website I find intriguing ... though I'm not sure exactly how I might use it. I could see it as a place to keep a backup list of my library that I can view from anywhere. The use of tags might help me keep track of what topics I have in books. I might event use them to tell me where the book is. There is ability to add reviews to books, but few were actually available. The different views, like the author "cloud", are interesting and might be helpful in finding interesting books to read. Maybe I could discover some folks with similar libraries ... and interests. It's in beta still so it will be interesting to see what develops ... or if Amazon buys it! My problem? You can upload books to a personal library by entering ISBN or keywords. The program will look up and add any books with valid numbers. I have a library that is upwards of 8,000 titles - at twenty a pop it's gonna take a long time. It costs $10 annually to add more than 200 titles ($25 for eternal use). My imported ISBN data was rejected as "wrong" way too often. Maybe I'll just use it to enter books I'm reading or books I'm thinking about reading. Then again, maybe I'll see if I can find out how to get Challies simple book list software to do that. Or maybe I can get all my friends (virtual and "real") to upload their books and we can see what is shaping our lives and minds. By the way, I have been using Ministry Notebook to manage my library ... an older, clunky, program that is never upgraded, but I haven't found anything else yet.