Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Library Thing

I’ve just come across Library Thing, and I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s an online catalogue for your personal book collection. The buzz page is full of quotes saying how exciting this is, but it leaves me feeling that I’ve obviously missed something. Or perhaps I’m just the little boy looking at the naked emperor.
 
I already have a catalogue of my library, built with a very flexible application: BookCat. This has more bells and whistles than frankly I know what to do with, but at its core it does what I want in a straightforward and satisfying manner. So I’m scratching my head trying to think why I would want to do something similar using an online service (one that has far, far less flexibility than BookCat). I mean, I can understand it with photos – Flickr is an online photo cataloging and photo-sharing service that I do use. It’s easy to share an image (after all, what you see is what you get) – but all you can share about a book is metadata, not the book itself. So what is the point?
 
I expect I am missing something, so I’ll play with Library Thing for a little while and see if the penny drops…

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3 responses to “Library Thing”

  1. Michael Avatar
    Michael

    Okay, I’ll play.I suspect that the allure is a bit lessened for you, given that you have a mature library already, are adept at spotting what you do and do not like in books, and (I assume) can spend the time keeping up with newly released books to stay on top of things.On the other hand, I’ve got a modest and growing cookbook collection. I’d like to see what cookbooks other folks find important, and to peek at the rest of their collection to see if their general tastes line up with mine (or not). Also, there is a bit of a zeitgeist factor – among this particular community of users, what is popular at the moment? What’s freshly added? &c.It’s not quite as compelling as Flickr for the reason you mention – you can share a photo, but I’m going to have to go out and check out or purchase a copy of a book that I want. However, I expect that it’s much more cozy and human than the reader recommendations at Amazon, for example, and seeing full collections gives me more data to judge the credibility of a reviewer.That said, I haven’t registered or browsed the site in detail yet. I could be blathering on.

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  2. Michael Avatar
    Michael

    (It’s bad etiquette to reply to your own email, is it also the same for blog comments?)Also, I don’t think that the LibraryThing site is designed to be a full catalog, but more of a basic metadata repository geared towards peer recommendations. This is in contrast to BookCat, essentially an electronic catalog where you get to do all the typing. They’re meant for different purposes.

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  3. Geoff Avatar
    Geoff

    Mike, you make some good points. Whether LibraryThing is designed to be a full catalogue or not, it clearly isn’t at this point. BookCat wins hands down, even when I ignore the book-loaning features of BookCat. BookCat is also better at automatically populating a catalogue entry via online retrieval – I had over 600 failures when I supplied a list of my ISBNs to LibraryThing. As you say, it will probably come down to zeitgeist – if it works for me, then I’ll stick with LibraryThing, but if it’s the usual cacophony of crap (as Sturgeon predicts), then I’ll carry on with the usual channels.

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