Books Online

I know there are a whole lot of entries I should be adding here before this... But I've been spending (wasting) quite a lot of time on this stuff recently and thought I'd mention it.



I've been using Book Collector Pro for many years now to organise my library of books. The program works wonderfully well and the fact that it gets all of its information online makes entry very easy. However, by definition, it's a private program which runs on my computers. In order to share the information I have to publish it on one of my web sites somewhere. I will probably continue to use Book Collector for quite some time to come as there is a lot of information in their database which I can't (yet) store somewhere else.

Library Thing is a completely online library collection service where one can store one's book collection online where it is always available. There are a few big advantages to this. One is what they refer to as "tags". With this notion you can add any sort of tagged information to books to find them, group them or sort them later. Even more interesting is that you can see other people's libraries with the same tags and browse. I find the tag cloud and the author cloud functions quite fun and the statistics function can be quite interesting.

But one of the functions I found to be the most interesting and practical for me is the PDA version of the site. This allows me to access my library, or anyone else's for that matter, directly on my Blackberry or my Palm via the Internet. This can be invaluable as it allows me to see if I already have a book when I'm looking for books in stores or talking to people.

Adding books from Book Collector was really easy as Library Thing works almost entirely with ISBNs. I exported the list of ISBNs from Book Collector, imported them in to Library Thing, waited a few hours while it compared the ISBNs with books in Amazon and elsewhere and when I awoke the next morning I had about 500 books in my online library.

I have since been spending way too much time fine tuning my library entries and browsing around through my library and other people's libraries...

You'll find a couple of new references to Library Thing down on the bottom of the right tool bar...

Book Crossing
Wihle browsing through Library Thing I got sidetracked over to Book Crossing. It looks like another very interesting web concept. We have a whole bunch of books we're about to ged rid of, as the kids have grown out of them, and this looks like a really great way to do so. I immediately set up an account, ordered a bunch of stickers and will start registering books when I get some time. Looks like an interesting project along the same lines as Freecycle while throwing in a lot of literary aspects and references.

Now you know why I've been too busy to update my blog!