Librarything: Crowd-sourcing for readers.
August 26, 2008 1:13 pm Finding books, ReviewI live in fear of a Mount TBR (to be read) avalanche, but I still can’t get enough book recommendations. One of my favourite tools for book recommendations is LibraryThing.
LibraryThing begins as a book cataloguing service - up to 200 books for free, and and your whole library for a small lifetime membership fee. You can do all the standard things - tag and search your books, add notes and reviews and select cover art for display. Fancy graphics let you visualize your library as a montage of covers. Maybe some readers would find that enough.
But the real value comes in leveraging crowd-sourced information through the libraries of others. You can select a user-uploaded cover, if Amazon doesn’t supply one to match yours. And you can see others with similar libraries, and get recommendations of what books you might like, based on the books you already have. This is a cool feature. I used to only enter books as I read them, and not my big pile of TBR’s. The recommendation feature would routinely serve me up a list of the unread books I had sitting on my bookshelf. So cool.
Other cool features include the inclusion of real libraries, and libraries of famous dead people, or current authors. They have a unique Early Reviewers program, that allocates books to those with the most appropriate library. And if you don’t like amazon reviews, this is an excellent source for book reviews.
Related posts:
- Ebooks for fiction readers, a summary
- Indigenous Literacy Project : Readers Quest Online Bookclub
- Book Review: Neuromancer by William Gibson
- Six ways support your reading habit without wasting money
- An Introduction to Bookcrossing
September 10th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
I too am a LibraryThing lover… with a lifetime membership.
I posted the message below on another of your blogs but, just in case you missed it, here it is again.
There’s a new version of Arukiyomi’s 1001 books spreadsheet. Along with some cool new features, there are lists of both the revised 1001 books and those that were removed from the new 2008 list. That’s right, the list has changed!
If you want a free copy of the spreadsheet, head over to Arukiyomi’s blog.
Happy reading!
September 11th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
@Arukiyomi:
Thanks for leaving the link. I mean to write a post soon on 1001 books resources, and your spreadsheet will definitely be a part of it!