Review: LibraryThing

LibraryThing has developed very quickly into the best book cataloguing website on the net.  It has so many features I would find it hard to write about all of them, but its invaluable even for the probably limited use I make of it.  LibraryThing is a free service for the first 200 books (I've only listed 100 so far), after which you can buy a year's unlimited subscription for $10 or a lifetime membership for $25.

Adding books to your catalogue couldn't be easier.  You just enter the title, author or ISBN into the Add Books box on the homepage (and various other places) and LibraryThing searches Amazon (you can specify .com or .uk) and 680 world libraries to identify the book.  You then select the edition you have, and it is automatically slotted in to your catalogue.  The wide range of catalogues searched means that LibraryThing is quite capable of finding out of print and even very old books, an example being my 1925 edition of Essay's of Elia by Charles Lamb which it has catalogued quite successfully.  A new feature is a $15 ISBN scanner that plugs into your computer's USB socket and feeds ISBN numbers directly into LibraryThing (I'm sure this would be very useful when intitally setting up your library). 

Once your catalogue has been created you can view it in various different ways (styles) under the "Your  Library" tab.  Books can be sorted into any order on the main fields, tags can be added, additional information can be included (location, books loaned out, whether you own it or borrowed it etc).  You can rate books, create your own reviews and share them if you want, and see what other people thought of the book, how many other users own it, and see if any online discussions of the book exist.  I read some fairly obscure books and am always surprised to see when I add a book how many other people already own it. 

If you have a blog, you can include a LibraryThing blog widget which will show various options such as random books (this is the one I use here on A Common Reader at the bottom right of this page), author cloud, recently added, tag cloud and so on.

LibraryThing provides some intersting statistics on your library.  For example, I was surprised to find that 17% of the books I have catalogued so far were written in original language of German and that the average publication date of the books I have catalogued is 2003. 

A new feature provides all members with a personalised homepage (see mine here) which provides users with a summary of most things they'd be interested in, such as:

• summary of your library
• automatically generated recommendations
• member recommendations (people who read the same book as you also liked . . .)
• latest reviews
• local events
• featured authors
• on this day

The Zeitgist page is always fun to read, containing many facts and figures about LibraryThing, such as 50 largest libraries catalogued (quite a few people have over 10,000 books on the system), most reviewed books (oh dear, its Harry Potter!), lowest rated authors, authors with most "completist" readers (i.e. they have the complete works of . . . ), top languages translated from (French comes first of course).

LibraryThing are quite upfront about how their recommendation system works.  It seems pretty comprehensive to me and has brought books to my attention I wouldn't otherwise be aware of.  The system includes:

• A large number of primary recommendations for ever member—usually 1,000—based on a single comprehensive algorithm.
• Individual recommendation lists for each member's tags.
• Filtering of recommendations by popular LibraryThing tags.
• Individual lists of other members' recommendations
• Up to 500 so-bad-they're-good recommendations, building off the LibraryThing Unsuggester, and called "Your Unsuggester."* We hope "What I shouldn't read" has some meme legs.
• A "why" feature for each recommendation, laying out what the recommendation was based on.

(list above cut from the LibraryThing blog)

For those who are into social networking (I am not), LibraryThing offers the usual buddy system, discussion threads and thematic groups.  No doubt many people use these but for myself the cataloguing and  information services are what LibraryThing is about and provide everything I could possibly need in managing my personal library.  A really excellent service, run by committed people who seem to enjoy communicating with their users and who seem proud of what they have achieved.  I really can't recommend it highly enough.