Friday, September 21, 2007

Librarything

Ugh. I had to post something to get that gawd-awful picture of me off the top of the page. To think, that picture is going to haunt my official record for another 2 years.

Most of the regulars over at the Flight Deck seem to be avid readers and book collectors. I count myself among that number. In fact, I'm a bit of a book geek. Years ago, when my collection was smaller, I actually had all of my books arranged by Dewey Decimal number. When we were looking for a new home in Annapolis, one of the features we (ok, I) wanted was a room to serve only as my library.

Then my buddy Adeodatus hipped me to a nifty online tool called Librarything, which took the geekiness to a new level. Basically, it's an online database where you can catalog your books. They even have an import tool where you can upload a text file of all your book's ISBNs (the ID number above the UPC barcode) and Librarything fills in the rest. Complete with pictures of the covers.

Granted, if you have a lot of books it may take some time to enter them all, but I thought it was worth it for me in the long run. My favorite feature is the ability to see other user's collections and books that you have in common. No matter how obscure a title, there's probably another Librarything member with the same book.

The site is http://www.librarything.com/. For an example, and you can view my profile and library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/JeopardyinMD.

Ignore the one comment about owning a Debbie Gibson book. We were all young and foolish once.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is something troubling about a husband who has time to catalog his books. Obviously, your wife needs to have instruction by an older wiser type.

Anonymous said...

I see you have reacted to my challenge to pick up my slack while I am deployed.

Keep it up, you are doing great!

Flavius Aetius said...

yeah, umm, and you're not blogging about the marcia and jan brady thing because????