LibraryThing – your virtual book-shelf

I’m trying out a pretty neat web service called LibraryThing. It allows you archive all your books in a database, and then display them for instance on your blogg (check it out in my right hand column on this blog). So far I’ve only entered about 200 books in the database, but I’m planning to enter them all eventually.

The cool thing is that you can enter books by simply entering the ISBN number and let one of the many catalogues that LibraryThing is connected with retrieve the information. Of course this works best with books in English, but for my Swedish books I can use LIBRIS, or the university library of Stockholm or Gothenburg.

For most of my English books I have used Amazon.com as source, since they have quite a lot of book covers in their database, hence I don’t have to search the web or take my of pictures to find covers to display. Though that is an option that works, even if it’s rather time-consuming, for the Swedish section.

So what’s it good for? Well, it gives you a searchable index of all your books, which you can share with others. It’s a good pointer if someone wants to buy you a book as a gift. It gives you opportunities to get to know others with a similar book taste (like all things web2.0 it’s of course user and community centered).

You can add 200 books to your catalogue for free. If you want to add more, you can choose between a yearly fee of $10 or a “for life” membership for $25. I picked the latter, and I hope more do so that the service’s life will be long.

Here’s my LibraryThing catalogue. Not yet very representative of my library, but I’m working on it.

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