Book Catalogs
I recently saw a rave for LibraryThing in the Poets & Writers magazine. But this is such an old idea in Web 2.0 tagging era no? So nothing to rave about here. Besides, I saw that there is a WTF limit on the number of books you get to catalog for free: 200 (come on folks! even kid bibliophiles read that many by the time they are ten!), and then you pay. As I am too stingy (yes, I am addicted to free stuff; staying in the university for far too long does that to you), I am now considering setting up my virtual bookshelf at one of these places: Reader 2, All Consuming (I will mostly go with this one, no yucky ads so far here), or the (somewhat unstable) English version of the Chinese hit Douban. Y'all try these out too, and tell me what you think.
I also should buy one of these (still yucky-mucky) scanning pens soon, so that I can scan text that I usually underline, and upload it to my online "bookshelf".
Update: Someone who is passionate about LibraryThing gave me a gift membership, and provided a comparison of these few services. See the comments.
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Tim
Here, have an account...
Here, have a free account. I think you'll find that LibraryThing does a LOT more than those other servcies, and does it better. AllConsuming may not have creepy ads, but it's owned by Amazon and runs off Amazon data. Indeed, all services EXCEPT LibraryThing use only Amazon data. This means you don't own your data, you can't change your data (except tags), and the data quality is the sort necessary for running a store, and no more. LibraryThing has much better data, building on the Library of Congress and 45 other libraries around the world, as well as all the national Amazons. And the data is improved by LibraryThing's truly revolutionary wiki-like cataloging ability. Also, LibraryThing is by far the most popular of the services--adding 40,000 books yesterday, where Reader2 has 50,000 books in almost a year of operation (AllConsuming doesn't release statistics, but it's Alexa traffic indicates it's only a little better than Reader2, particularly as much of the "conumption" is of video games, water, girlfriend's earlobes, etc.). And if you don't like something, send us an email. LibraryThing is a vibrant, interactive community. (Indeed, the blog is SO active with comments that Blogger picked it as one of its top blogs.)
Anyway, enough rambling. Here's your code:
To sign up for LibraryThing go to www.librarything.com
Your gift membership code is: ********
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Woha! Thanks
for the free account. Much obliged.
Also I really didn't do much of a comparitive study between all these services, other the very obvious cost comparision. And I don't like Amazon all that much either - I buy most of my books from an indy bookstore here.
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