Wednesday, July 30, 2008

LibraryThing = Addiction

A month or two ago, I read somewhere about LibraryThing.  (I think it was a Wisconsin blogger who turned me on to it, but I can’t remember who, so whoever you are:  Thank you!) It’s a site where you can enter in all your books and make your own library catalog.  I finally looked into it more on Friday, and our house has not been the same since.

So far I have added 627 of our books (you just enter in the ISBN or Library of Congress number or look up the title or author), and it’s fun as heck to look at our “author cloud” and see who else has the same books we have. 

Most of our books are Owen’s, his brother’s, his Dads, grandfather’s, or stepfather’s.  Some are mine—college textbooks, reference books, a few paperbacks (I’m a go-to-the-library person).  We didn’t record all the kids’ books. 

The average publication date of our books is 1982.

We have duplicates of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and The Prince. 

The oddest book in our collection has to be Sex for Dummies, which was a gag gift (I hope) we received as a wedding gift.

The oldest two books we have are Just David by Eleanor H. Porter, published in 1916 and History’s Greatest War: A Pictorial Narrative by Samuel John Duncan-Clark, published in 1920.

It’s a fun site, and it’s free up to 200 books.  I’ve had so much fun working on it these past few days, I’m tempted to run to the neighbors’ house and see if they want a LibraryThing thing, too.

(4) Comments
Posted by Wendy at 2158 hrs
Culture

  1. Bear in mind that we have many books that are older than 1916 (the Iliad and Bible come to mind), but the editions we have are newer.

    Posted by Owen on July 30, 2008 at 2322 hrs


  2. angry  Well, duh.

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on July 30, 2008 at 2355 hrs


  3. Please, PLEASE!!! come to my house and put my books on the Library Thing.  I would love that!!

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on July 31, 2008 at 1007 hrs


  4. Not to sound too much like a conspiracy theorist, but who all has access to your stored inventory? Do you really know?

    If it turned out that someone in the government knew about this site and wanted to monitor what you’re reading - would that bother you?

    This would sure be a cheap and easy way for them to do just that: with no effort on their part at all, people self-report their own collections.

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on July 31, 2008 at 1031 hrs


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