LibraryThing, or Thing 14

Now I'm starting to confuse myself. While I couldn't care less if people use the same tags as me, or like the same news articles, etc., I think it's really cool that I can see how many LibraryThing users have the same books as I do. I took strange enjoyment in being unique enough to be the first to have a book, and found it interesting to see which books that I thought would be popular had hardly any copies in others' libraries.

This would have been really nice when I was cataloging/inventorying our small parochial school's library a few years ago. It didn't take me long at all to add 98 books to my library. I like the display option that allows comments, as I plan to use this field to indicate which books I've read. I probably won't use LibraryThing as a tool to catalog the books that I own, but it will be useful in keeping track of books I've read, finding books by authors I like, and so on.

I think the review section is interesting. It is so easy yet so difficult to find reviews of anything these days. For electronics, I head to Epinions and Cnet. And then to Amazon. Or are there good reviews in the shopping comparison sites or Circuit City? For books and toys, there's the same dilemma. There are so many review sites available that it's hard to know where to start if you really want to delve into reviews on a product.

I also found the book swap links to be helpful. I've sold books on Ebay and to the local used bookstore, but it's nice to know of some other book swap services.

I'm not sure of the library applications--currently a lot of catalogs have tools for listing new books or bestsellers in the collection. Perhaps a community or library could start its own book-swap site; people could enter the books they have and trade with one another?

Off to set up a link to my library. I was surprised that the best match of other LibraryThing users was only 3 of the same books that I have.