Online Library Catalog Thingers [Updated x2]

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.

Posted in: Books Dear Diary

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