LibraryThing

It's a social networking/book cataloging site -- I've been a member since September 2005 when they opened their doors. Cool and strange place.

I love it. You can visit people who bought your books and check out their ratings and reviews. They will also list you as the author I think it helps make a bit of a connection.

Authors and readers should also check out Shelfari:

http://www.shelfari.com

Be wary re: the screen where they invite you to share your email address book. It's perfectly safe, but they then invite every fargin' name in said address book, using your name as the invitee.

You might not wanna do that

I have most of my books on LibraryThing: I am obsessive.

Here's my library.

(I'm very proud of myself, having only learned how to do that clever linky thing yesterday. Thank you again, those who showed me how.)

It never occurred to me to look for my own stuff on LibraryThing.

I'm a little surprised that my ex-boyfriend's partner seems to have blithely catalogued my books onto their shared library. I guess she's stopped hating me.

I've been on LibraryThing for awhile. I've not used it much for networking (though people are welcome to friend me). I do like being able to see who has similar books to me. It's fun to see the trends in what sort of books go together.

I'm sure there's another thread about LT here somewhere, in which I described my little barcode scanner that I used to scan in all my books. Not that I'm obsessive, you understand. Or a gadget-geek. Oh, no. Not me.

Old Hack said:

I'm sure there's another thread about LT here somewhere, in which I described my little barcode scanner that I used to scan in all my books. Not that I'm obsessive, you understand. Or a gadget-geek. Oh, no. Not me.

Click to expand...

I like the cuecat too

Thre are several other book-oriented social networking sites.

This story compares three such sites:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6458174.html

Here's a story mentioning five:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88514715

Medievalist said:

I like the cuecat too

Click to expand...

Ahem... you've disabled the serial number, haven't you?

I use gurulib.com. I catalogue all my books there and write reviews of the books I've read.

Medievalist said:

I like the cuecat too

Click to expand...

Ha. Mine's not a cuecat. Mine's a Flic, which I can use to batch-scan with, away from my computer. Saves me having to carry all my books up to the computer, AND allows my children to try to get cans of tomatoes to download into LibraryThing. MUCH more flexible.

Yikes. Entering one's whole library on a website? Where do you find the time? I have about 1,800 books, many of them pre-dating ISBNs. I'm not sure why it matters than someone else may have read the same books I have. For tracking our own books, maybe there's some value.

Thanks for the links. I'm not sure I'm going to sign up for even more websites and spend hours diddling around on them hoping maybe swap messages with somebody who maybe (1 in 1,000 chance?) might someday buy something I write. Yeah, it's not all about sales. In fact I hate selling; it's the last thing in the world I want to do. But there needs to be some kind of value. Online "social networking" is a weird thing. It takes a lot of time (away from our writing) and delivers what? More semi-anonymous people to type at? Another place where we can be bombarded by bulletins and messages from people we "know"?

Any site that expects you to give away your address book is just a spammer as far as I'm concerned. I appreciate the warning.

I guess I'm the Devil's advocate for this topic. It's just weird seeing one website after another attract zillions of people, when I just can't see the point. I get "reaching out to people," just not in such pointless ways. I admit, I once logged some bills into WheresGeorge.com before feeling like a dope ... these sites don't seem much different.

Loved the comment about trying to post cans of tomatoes to LibraryThing. I wonder if it would credit them to Andy Warhol?

Scott, I don't use LT as a social networking site: I'm just a natural obsessive, and love to catalogue and organise things. I also like to be able to check if I have a particular title easily: with around 2,000 books in various shelves around the house, I do sometimes buy duplicate copies without realising.

As for the tomatoes, LT tried to attribute them to Jeffery Archer, but I felt they were too complex and literary for that, so I deleted them from my list. Shame.

I started using LibraryThing as a way to keep track of books for my dissertation -- I was working away from home a lot, as a consultant and often wasn't using my own computer.

Now, it's just convenient. I can check to see if I have a book on my phone, for instance.