Silly daddy

There's a cool tool called LibraryThing (www.librarything.com) that lets you build a catalog of your books and only requires an ISBN (or author and title, or EAN, or Library of Congress call number or...) to look up a book's full citation and add it. You can also enter brief comments about your book, as well as a little review.

Well, you could knock me down with a feather: I've been looking for something like this for a long time, and the data-entry was always the biggest barrier. Since I signed up I've been going through all my boxes of books, having a grand time meeting old friends and findging books I'd forgotten I ever owned. Here's what I've catalogged so far:

www.librarything.com/catalog/wenestvedt

I've been trying to enter really short reviews as I go along.

There's a feature that suggests books based on those owned by people with collections similar to yours, and it's been very accurate. Seeing all those suggested titles of books I've already read leads me to want to add all the books I've borrowed from friends or from the library, just for the sake of being complete. (And then I could review those, too!) But that would be quite a project indeed...

I found one catalog that is filled with just digital music files of concert bootlegs. Possibly not what Tim's (LT's inventor) may have intended, but interesting nonethless.

The way I've reconnected with all my books -- long since packed away out of sight -- I love LibraryThing!