November 29, 2005

Library Thing A tool for building an online representation of all those precious books on your shelves. Browse the shelves of others, find people with similar reading interests.

It's a subscriber service ($10 for a year, $25 for lifetime) but you can try it out for free by adding up to 200 books. And it's interesting that it's gathered 15000+ members (I couldn't find any information as to how many of them are subscribers) since August 2005.

posted by planetthoughtful 18 years ago
  • I love LibraryThing! I found it when Languagehat mentioned it in passing in an AskMe answer. I'm slow to get my books uploaded, though. I've wondered if they had a group function, the way flickr or audioscrobbler do, for Monkeyfilter purposes. Any other Monkeys on LT?
  • this sounds really really cool. Dont know if I will ever have time to catalog all my books, but I'd like to try.
  • Funny, I thought about linking this when languagehat mentioned it on his blog a while ago. I never jumped on board because, yeah, I'm lazy. But I think it would be neat to see what other monkeys read (or what they have on their shelf, at any rate).
  • I'm experimenting with a free account at the moment. It's a fun idea, but I think it could use a couple of improvements. In particular, when doing an author search to add books, it would be helpful if you could select multiple books from the result list, where you own more than 1 title by that author. Given that it's still in Beta, I'm assuming the developer will add more functionality before it hits release. I haven't seen any way to create specific social groups (ie a 'MonkeyFilter' group) to which you can subscribe, but I've emailed the developer asking if that is in his development plans.
  • Have you tried MediaChest?
  • I'm there, with a paid account. Love it, and the developer is very open to suggestions.
  • Have you tried MediaChest? No, I haven't yet, though I'll take a poke around inside it. I was a little bemused by some of the copy on the front page: "Meet New Friends: I met some cute guys that actually shared my interests -- they like to read the same books I do and listen to the same music. Becca. Seattle, WA" I don't, maybe it would be worth it if the guys were really cute... Back to Library Thing: I can't get over someone not only having 8110 books in their personal library, but also the patience to enter them all in his / her Library Thing account.