Thing #12: A Thing about LibraryThing

I love LibraryThing. I've got more than 4100 books listed in my account. Granted, I'm a book collector so I already had a database of my collection so I just exported the ISBNs from that database and imported them into LibraryThing. That doesn't mean that I've tagged every book, or that my whole collection is in there (that original import didn't include any non-fiction) but it's still a big help. Now I can access my collection on my cell phone to answer that age-old question: Do I already own this?

And, did you know that if you've published a book or two and someone has cataloged your titles in LibraryThing you can get your own LT Author page?

Besides Tim's a great guy and I've met his rhino.

Thing #11: LibraryThing

I've been using LibraryThing for a few years now and love it! You can find my profile here. I've paid the $25 for a lifetime membership and (geek that I am) imported all of the ISBNs from my home catalog into my account to get started. Since then I add all my new books as soon as I get them home. Just seven more books and I'll have 4,000 in my account. My favorite part of the whole thing is being able to access the mobile version of my account on my cell phone in order to be able to answer that age-old question: Do I already own this? LibraryThing has come to my rescue many times. I've also met Tim Spalding, the creator of LT and he's both wonderful and intelligent. If you're interested in knowing more, check out this talk that Time gave to the staff of the Library of Congress in 2007.

LibraryThing does series

LibraryThing has added a new feature appropriately named "Series". Reading the announcement brought me back to my bookselling days when I created a notebook where each page contained a list of all the books in a series in publication order for all those customers who asked "which one is next?" Well, now the ability to to this is in LibraryThing.

To create a series, bring up the page for a book in the series and scroll down to the "Common Knowledge" area. Find the "Series (with order)" field and fill in the name of the series and the appropriate number in parenthesis. For example "The Monster Trilogy (1)". Do this for each of the books in the series. When you're all done, users can click on the series name on the book's page and get to a page dedicated to that series.

LibraryThing also allows for creating "multiple series" that a book can be associated with. Their example is the "publication order" vs. the "chronological order" for the Narnia books. [Note: I always read series in publication order. It's the way the author wrote them and as a result later books, although they may occur earlier in time, will assume you've read the earlier/later-in-time books and make more sense.)