If you are like me and spend a lot of time buying books, reading books and thinking about books, then you’ll be delighted with a new start-up Web site www.librarything.com. The site allows you to build an online catalog of your personal library. You can catalog up to 200 books for free and for larger libraries you pay a small one-time fee. But the site is much more than a personal catalog: it is a real community of bibliophiles from around the world. Members can look at other members’ libraries; you can find people who have the same books or the same literary tastes as you do, and create online groups to discuss certain topics. I was happy to find other members (15!) who consider Robert Lowell a favorite author, or other readers of Wolfgang Koeppen’s Tauben im Gras (Koeppen is still so obscure here that there is no Wikipedia entry in English). There are more and more German speaking members, and we now have our own site in German: www.librarything.de.
More than 15 million books have been cataloged on the site so far. I know it will take me months to get my very modest collection of books online, but you can use a CueCat Scanner to speed up the process for those books that have barcodes. Another great feature is that LibraryThing integrates with several bookswapping sites such as BookMooch. Through BookMooch I have gotten some great books to add to my library for free; one collector in Europe sent me a book in mint condition that cost 40 Euros. Of course, you need to give away books as well to participate, but most of us have dozens of books that we don’t intend to ever read again and that simply take up space on our bookshelves.
It’s nice to know there are still many passionate readers out there, and why shouldn’t bookworms have fun on the Web?
