I catalogue my books with LibraryThing and they are running a book pile photo contest at the moment. OK, the prizes aren't great (a LibraryThing tshirt, a CueCat barcode scanner, and a gift membership) but its a bit of fun.
If you don't know what LibraryThing is you could read my review here or visit the site.
If you're interested to see other peoples' book piles you can view them here.
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).
The ever-expanding BBC website is beta testing a new set of Topics pages which aim to bring together content from across the BBC, showing the
most relevant content they have to offer on a range of specific topics. An interesting list of topics is covered including Books. The page seems to be automatically generated by "sweeping" all the BBC's webpages whether from news or programme information.
It looks a bit thin at the moment, but might be worth watching. Its certainly no match to the books pages on the websites of the Times or Guardian.
