Network administrator Quentin Dodd alerted me to a cool new Internet service this week: librarything.com.
Librarything describes itself as "an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth."
Librarything is part cataloging application, part social network. You can use it to catalog your personal book collection, and then find other people with books similar to yours, and get recommendations of other books you might like. It offers a number of neat tools, including the ability to add a random selection of your books to a web page (as in the example to the right), and you can import or export your book list in a variety of formats.
A free account with librarything allows you to catalog up to 200 books. A paid account allows you to catalog any number of books. Paid personal accounts cost $10 for a year or $25 for a lifetime. It’s easy to get started — just go to librarything.com, enter a username and password of your choice, and your account will be created automatically. To add books to your collection, enter a title or author and librarything presents matches from amazon.com, or Library of Congress.
Happy cataloging!
