A while back, I looked at some of the online library web­sites — you know, those sites like Last.fm, but for books.  You tell it what books you own and what you’re cur­rently read­ing.  It’ll make sug­ges­tions, show you what your friends have read, and all that good com­mu­nity stuff.  I never got around to sign­ing up for any of them because I didn’t want to man­u­ally add all of my book infor­ma­tion.  Every book I own (565, as of this writ­ing) has been cat­a­loged by bar­code scan­ner and loaded into Deli­cious Mon­ster.  With no way to upload that data, there wasn’t much point in wast­ing my time typ­ing in (or even copy­ing and past­ing) each ISBN.

Recently, some­thing prompted me to look again.  I exam­ined Library­Thing and Goodreads, as I know peo­ple on both ser­vices.  I set­tled on Library­Thing because it has an importer that works with Deli­cious Library.  I exported to a text file, then uploaded that file to the web­site.  Quite quickly, I dis­cov­ered that Library­Thing has a cap of only 200 books with­out pay­ing for the ser­vice.  It’s doubt­ful that I’ll get enough enjoy­ment out of it to jus­tify $10/year.  After all, I can get rec­om­men­da­tions from Ama­zon or directly from friends.

Because of the above lim­i­ta­tion, I prob­a­bly won’t be using it, but if you want to check out my account (con­tain­ing, alpha­bet­i­cally, about the first third of my books), it’s at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/BrianEnigma.

EDIT: I may have to backpedal a lit­tle bit, as I’ve just been informed that GoodReads can import from Deli­cious Library, so I’m check­ing it out now.

EDIT2: Every­thing seems to have imported, but a few books got imported incor­rectly for some rea­son.  I’m pretty cer­tain that I’ve never heard of, read, or own a novel called Cold Tar­get, but it is now in my library, accord­ing to Goodreads.  I’ll prob­a­bly leave it because try­ing to rec­on­cile the dif­fer­ences may be like find­ing a nee­dle in a haystack.  Because there doesn’t appear to be a cap on the num­ber of books in a library, I think I’ll be stick­ing with Goodreads.  My pro­file is http://www.goodreads.com/profile/brianenigma.

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3. My library-loan audio­book dilemma
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5. Flesh is Grass

Tagged as: Books, catalog, deliciouslibrary, goodreads, librarything, website