System 13

In mid-July, I discovered LibraryThing. It was love at first site (sorry, terrible pun).

LibraryThing is basically a book-geek’s dream come true. It lets you do what you’ve (I’ve) always wanted to do with my books. Easily add all of your books to it. Tag them. Sort them (there are a variety of views, including a ‘virtual shelf’, with cover images of your books). Review them and rate them. Read other reviews from other users. Get automatic recommendations based on the books you own, or the tags you use combined with the tags that others use, or the ratings you’ve given books in your catalog.

Adding books is about as simple as possible. Click Add Books, type in a title (or author, or ISBN or card number), and you’ll get a list of possible matches. LibraryThing uses amazon.com, the Library of Congress, and a few others. After you get your results, simply click on your match, and it’s added. Click on ‘tags’ below it, and you can apply tags to the book. If you’re more into mass tagging, there’s a power user editing option on your catalog page. Select all of the books you want to tag, then put as many tags as you want on them, all in one fell swoop.

Every book has a page at LibraryThing, complete with ratings, who else has the book, tags used for the book, links to buy the book at amazon.com, Abebooks, bookfinder, etc. There are other things built around this information: books that are tagged similarly, books recommended based on owning the book in question, conversations with other users about the book in question… It seems tat the makers of LibraryThing add something new damn near constantly.

I could gush and gush about LibraryThing for quite a while, but instead, I recommend you check it out if you’re a book-lover. You can make an account for free, which will let you add 200 books. For $10 you get an unlimited account for a year, and for $25 you get a lifetime account.

And no, I don’t work for LibraryThing (although I would if they asked!)

By the way, here’s my profile.

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