Oh boy! I just found another way to spend enormous amounts of time on a compulsive, time-draining, anal task. There's a site called LibraryThing that is like flickr but with books. You can put your whole collection out there and tag it. You can export data from it. And it has a blog widget. Yeah! It's everything I can do to stop myself from inputting every book I've bought or read since I moved. They are scattered throughout my condo wherever I stashed them as I finished them. There are at least three under my bed at the moment.
All the others are waiting in approximately twenty boxes for me to get some more shelves and unpack them. They're all sorted alphabetically, and by hardback fiction, paperback fiction, children's fiction, non-fiction computer, non-fiction cookbooks, non-fiction self-help, and non-fiction adult.
There's a page called LibraryThing Zeitgeist that shows top 25 largest libraries, the top authors, most popular tags. You can see who's library is most similar to yours. And if you want to keep your list private you can. You can list 200 books for free or right now it's $10 for lifetime usage. I uploaded a couple titles to test it out. Whoo hoo! I'm giddy with delight. I've been thinking I ought to get some software to catalog my library, but this is more fun.
I'll have to figure out how I want to use the widget on CB. But now I have to get back to work. I figured if I shared, maybe I could settle down. Why does the thought of typing in thousands of ISBN numbers fill me with delight? Maybe because I'll actually know how many books I own?
I found LibraryThing via I Know What I Know. I would put Scott on my Obsessively Clicked list but he doesn't post everyday, so he's on my Occasionally Browsed list.
Okay, back to work now. What I really want to do is start bringing stacks of books into my office to enter. If this had a section for movies I'd explode with joy.
I'm famous! I just checked my visitor log and found myself quoted on LibraryThing about LibraryThing. How cool is that? I've never been quoted before.
http://www.librarything.com/buzz.php
I'm in the middle column near the end. I'm famous :-)
Posted by: Dodi | Friday, September 23, 2005 at 06:20 PM