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Library Thing
I heard about this from a post by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kate_nepveu.
It's an online service for creating a catalog of your books and seeing who else has the same books. The homepage claims you can keep your catalog private, but as far as I can see, that's a lie. At least, I have yet to see any option to hide my catalog from strangers. The free accounts are limited to 200 books, but otherwise seem to be full-featured, and it's very easy to set up (just give them a username and password).
I'm on LiveJournal (and online in general) mainly to talk about books I like. But I've noticed that my booklog is heavily biased towards newer works that I'm getting from the library. So I thought it would be helpful to show people what I actually found to be worth buying/keeping.
So after Kate mentioned this, I decided to try it out. I created an account and started inputting books. Unfortunately for my stated intentions, I started with my least accessible bookshelves, so what you see there still isn't very representational; some of the books had me saying "Gee, I thought I'd gotten rid of that already" or "I really should read/finish that one sometime."
Library Thing, while a neat idea, compares poorly to Readerware. There are only two ways to enter new books: type all the info by hand or do a keyword search. I did the latter whenever possible (using ISBNs since that's what they're for), but the search only uses two sites (Library of Congress and Amazon of your choice); RW seemed to do a much better job (it certainly searched more sites). Also, LT is web-based, so there's lots of wait time: type ISBN, wait for search results, click the one you want, wait for update, repeat. RW, on the other hand, let you use a barcode scanner (and it supported the CueCat[1]) to scan a whole bunch of books, and then search for the information all at once. RW also stored much more info; LT just saves Title, Author, Date, ISBN, LC Call No., Dewey, Publication, Summary, Comments, and Tags. I assume the last is intended to serve the purposes of Contents, Series, Binding, Subjects, etc. (Since they're searching the LoC in the first place, you'd think they'd grab the Subject Headings too, but noooo, they'd rather the users reinvent them for every single book they enter.)
[1] CueCat is a barcode scanner that my local newspaper gave away free as a promotion. Yes, you get what you pay for, but since cataloging my books is the only use I've had for one, I'm not spending $60-$80 for a real one.
kate_nepveu.It's an online service for creating a catalog of your books and seeing who else has the same books. The homepage claims you can keep your catalog private, but as far as I can see, that's a lie. At least, I have yet to see any option to hide my catalog from strangers. The free accounts are limited to 200 books, but otherwise seem to be full-featured, and it's very easy to set up (just give them a username and password).
I'm on LiveJournal (and online in general) mainly to talk about books I like. But I've noticed that my booklog is heavily biased towards newer works that I'm getting from the library. So I thought it would be helpful to show people what I actually found to be worth buying/keeping.
So after Kate mentioned this, I decided to try it out. I created an account and started inputting books. Unfortunately for my stated intentions, I started with my least accessible bookshelves, so what you see there still isn't very representational; some of the books had me saying "Gee, I thought I'd gotten rid of that already" or "I really should read/finish that one sometime."
Library Thing, while a neat idea, compares poorly to Readerware. There are only two ways to enter new books: type all the info by hand or do a keyword search. I did the latter whenever possible (using ISBNs since that's what they're for), but the search only uses two sites (Library of Congress and Amazon of your choice); RW seemed to do a much better job (it certainly searched more sites). Also, LT is web-based, so there's lots of wait time: type ISBN, wait for search results, click the one you want, wait for update, repeat. RW, on the other hand, let you use a barcode scanner (and it supported the CueCat[1]) to scan a whole bunch of books, and then search for the information all at once. RW also stored much more info; LT just saves Title, Author, Date, ISBN, LC Call No., Dewey, Publication, Summary, Comments, and Tags. I assume the last is intended to serve the purposes of Contents, Series, Binding, Subjects, etc. (Since they're searching the LoC in the first place, you'd think they'd grab the Subject Headings too, but noooo, they'd rather the users reinvent them for every single book they enter.)
[1] CueCat is a barcode scanner that my local newspaper gave away free as a promotion. Yes, you get what you pay for, but since cataloging my books is the only use I've had for one, I'm not spending $60-$80 for a real one.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2005-09-23 11:06 pm (UTC)(link)2. If LibraryThing manages to find LoC data, it DOES grab all the information (click on the little card icon next to a book in your catalog to see it displayed). "Tags" are for personal, user-defined things (like "unread", "loaned out", "at work" as well as your own personal classification schemes, not to duplicate the already-present LoC data.)
There are obvious UI issues, since you couldn't find these features easily, but they do exist.
Oh, and they just added bar-code number lookup, so that bar-code-scanner users can input data that way. I don't think there's any way of importing lots of them en masse, though; you'd still need to do it one book at a time.
No arguments about the slowness, though. It is slow.
no subject
2. Yeah, but that is not editable, not displayed in the catalog view, not searchable, and of course only available if LoC actually has a record for the book in the first place (they didn't for about half the books I entered).
How does the barcode lookup work? It doesn't support CueCat's proprietary format (which isn't surprising), but I suspect most scanners output the straight numbers (UPC/EAN) and therefore would not be useful for searching.
PS Could you sign your comments so I recognize you in the future?
no subject
As an example / test case to show you, just now I looked over at the shelves and typed the following, plucked from the spine of one book: Puck Pook's Hill Rewards
Returns:
Nothing found in the Library of Congress.
Results from Amazon.com
The first one is accompanied by a thumbnail of the cover. That's it. I clicked on it, and it's added, with full LC information: even though they found it thru Amazon, that gives them the ISBN.
Anyhow, if you haven't seen it, take a look. My ID there is "thnidu". I haven't started serious cataloging -- ain't got the time -- but just the listings I see in IM could benefit from this.