LibraryThing
I love LibraryThing.
It basically does two things: it allows you to catalog all your books in a sharable format online and it's a community website. As you enter books, it automatically finds other people with your books, gives you suggestions about books of the same topic that other people have enjoyed, shows you ratings and reviews, offers (brand new) discussion groups on various topics and so on and so forth. The more books you add, the better the site gets.
Entry is stunningly simple. It can look up names, ISBN, LC numbers, whatever you have from your books in a variety of sources and find then and pull them down. Most of my books are findable in Amazon, but a few of my rare books were found in the Library of Congress. It's pretty fast. You add them, go back, tag them, and then it enters your tag into a "cloud" of tags on that book. You can then slice and dice your books however you want.
I've only entered 191 books so far -- I have not yet gotten up to the library upstairs or entered in the art books or the cookbooks, so this is only a sliver -- but if you want to see an example, here is my catalog.
As a bonus, it has instructions on how to import all your books from your amazon order history to get you started.
It basically does two things: it allows you to catalog all your books in a sharable format online and it's a community website. As you enter books, it automatically finds other people with your books, gives you suggestions about books of the same topic that other people have enjoyed, shows you ratings and reviews, offers (brand new) discussion groups on various topics and so on and so forth. The more books you add, the better the site gets.
Entry is stunningly simple. It can look up names, ISBN, LC numbers, whatever you have from your books in a variety of sources and find then and pull them down. Most of my books are findable in Amazon, but a few of my rare books were found in the Library of Congress. It's pretty fast. You add them, go back, tag them, and then it enters your tag into a "cloud" of tags on that book. You can then slice and dice your books however you want.
I've only entered 191 books so far -- I have not yet gotten up to the library upstairs or entered in the art books or the cookbooks, so this is only a sliver -- but if you want to see an example, here is my catalog.
As a bonus, it has instructions on how to import all your books from your amazon order history to get you started.
A. The iSight camera works as a good barcode reader for Delicious Library. So does any USB-enabled camcorder.
B. LibraryThing will import the XML from Delicious Library, and will export to a format that Delicious Library can use.
If it was worth something, DL has the option of opening up the Amazon "sell this stuff" page, where you type in a magic dollar amount and wait.
A. Scan books into Delicious Library using the iSight camera.
B. Export the XML into a file.
C. Use LibraryThing universal import to import the XML file.
D. Prune and purge.
The only thing is going back and adding the tags to all the books. I know we have at least 1000 books in the house -- I'm starting to think we have that many in the living room, but I am overstating things wildly -- and putting them all in by hand is a Project.
I admit, I've been sitting here tagging books at work between meetings. Bad me, no donut.
A Project? Hell, it's a job! (And I should know, since it's something Leems and I were hired to do for a rare books dealer when we were in college. The pay was crap, but it was a great job.)
I also got a beat-up First American edition of The Silmarillion, without the map, of course. Come to think of it, maybe the pay wasn't so crap after all...
Scary because I already have plenty of things that I'm only halfway done obsessing over, and it's so very easy to obsess about books. Where did I put that Cuecat?
CueCat
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