25 August 2006
A persistent vexation of mine is not being able to find the book I want. I know it’s on the shelf somewhere, but I just can’t find it. I’ve often spent ten minutes or more tracking down a book. My personal library is large (over 500 books), but it is by no means huge. Another issue is that I occasionally find myself buying multiple copies of a book–I forget what books I already own. I’ve often thought that I can’t be the only one with this problem and that there must be an easy way of organizing my books that someone else has pioneered.
Well, this week I discovered LibraryThing.com. It is a sublime website. Cataloguing a library of some size is never easy, but LibraryThing.com makes it nearly so. So what is LibraryThing?
First, it is a site designed to help you catalog your books. You can enter your books online–usually just a few words from the title and the author’s last name–and hit the search button. LibraryThing will create a catalog entry for you based on the catalog of the Library of Congress, Amazon.com, or any one of several dozen major libraries around the world. It will give you the Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal call numbers, the ISBN, publisher information, etc. In just a few hours I created catalog entries for over half of my books and I expect to be done by Sunday.
The search function works incredibly well. Gone are my days of going to the Library of Congress website to find data on a book. LibraryThing’s search interface is far easier and much faster. Although, LibraryThing does have trouble searching on the classics. Searching on "Dracula, Stoker", for example, turns up several hundred possibilities. These include commentaries on the novel as well as the primary work itself. And there is no easy way to sort the returned entries–a Googlesque problem. But for most books, published in a handful of editions, this is not an issue.
You can also add your own tags to the entries in your collection. So you can tag all your books on quotations, or on slang, or about dogs, or 18th century French poetry. Whatever tags meet your needs.
Your catalog data resides on the LibraryThing servers. (You have the choice of whether to keep it private or make it available for viewing to others.) But you can download it in comma or tab-delimited formats for use by spreadsheets or database programs. There are even features to allow you check your catalog from a mobile phone. (Useful when standing in the bookstore wondering if you have already have a copy of that book you are about to buy). And for those with large libraries, having a list of all your books offsite will help in reestablishing your collection in case of fire or other disaster.
The second aspect of the site is community. There are discussion forums galore. You can find other users who share the same tastes as you. (I share at least 41 books with another prominent contributor to the Wordorigins discussion forums. Go to the site and try to find him–his nearly 5,000 books puts my paltry 500 or so to shame.) Users can contribute reviews and share cataloging schemes. You can get a list of recommended books based on what is in the libraries of readers similar to you.
It’s also fun to look at some of the statistics of the books cataloged. As I write this, there are 71,838 collections, containing 5,087,028 books, of which 1,175,812 are unique works. The most popular author is (no surprise) J.K. Rowling with 37,552 copies of her books in the combined collections. Stephen King is second with 28,824. The Bard rolls in at seventh place with 15,860. The most popular book is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with 6,047 copies–Harry Potter books occupy the top six positions, all with over 5,000 copies–attesting to the reader loyalty engendered by the series. In seventh is The Da Vinci Code (4,662). And giving some solace to those who are despairing at the lack of "great" books, Orwell’s 1984 takes the eighth spot (3,835). (Ironic, as LibraryThing is the antithesis of Big Brother.) The Catcher In The Rye (3,710) and The Hobbit (3,709) round out the top ten.
The site is allows you to catalog up to 200 books for free. You can buy an annual membership for $10 that allows you an unlimited number of books in your catalog. Or a lifetime membership is just $25. So, the fees are quite reasonable and I, for one, was happy to pay to help keep such a site going.
I’m going to be spending the weekend in ontological ecstasy. I’ve already decided to going to rearrange the books by LC call number, with some variations from the official scheme that make sense for me (such as grouping all my books on toponyms together instead of regionally as the LC does). I haven’t decided whether or not to label the books with the call number. I’ll probably not do so, at least not at first.
