Library Thing

[mishalak]

I've tried it out using the first 24 of the books in my collection. So far I am less than thrilled. For those who do not know Library Thing is a website that allows you to catalog your personal library. It is free for your first 250 and then it costs if you want to do more. If I was just a reader, a person who accumulates books, this thing would be great. But for someone who tries to pay attention to things like edition and so on it has been less than thrilling. It is hard to get the particular edition information right. Particularly for books that are sold outside the usual channels like items from Easton Press, The Folio Society, and Hill House.

So is it useful to me? Probably not much more than using a database program would be. And I've discovered that one of my books has been quietly disintegrating in the dry air. Old leather bindings don't like Colorado's climate much. Good thing it isn't a terribly valuable one. Just a copy of The Prince from 1954. And terribly frustrating to try and enter in. No ISBN number on such a book.

Comments

[julesjones]

It's possible to get edition information in, but it takes a bit of learning. I've been varying a bit -- sometimes I just rattle through plugging in ISBNs, other times I'm being a lot more detailed. This is partly because what I want above all is an offsite catalogue of my books for insurance purposes, and I can sort out a lot of stuff later if I've at least got a basic list of what I've got.

I must get back to entering my Folio Society collection. That does take longer because I have to enter in the data by hand, rather than just the ISBN -- and I'm doing my bit by scanning the covers of older books where we can't just pull them down off the Society website. There's a little group of FS devotees putting the cover art into the database.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I must admit I had not thought of the offsite aspect. I did notice that my Gormenghast books all had cover art. But it would have been nice if that cover art was all linked or something. Select this cover art to get the edition information or something.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the (negative) information re LibraryThing -- saves me checking it out. The ISBN function would be useful, though the first three thousand or so of the titles in my accumulation were acquired before those numbers were created, and a good many others pre-date them. And I don't see any real advantage to having the catalog on a website when RW CDs are so inexpensive & easy to burn.

Not that I really expect ever to catalog them, mind you. Creating, in FileMaker Pro, a .form that would include all the information I want (including things like condition, setting date for Historical Mysteries, and keywords for various search criteria) would be easy enough, but the data-entry would be entirely too time-consuming, this late in the game. *sigh*

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I am going to try entering in another 25 books. Just to see if with practice it becomes easier. The biggest frustration for me was my Canadian first editions. I wasn't able to pull the information for them from anywhere, it seemed. And I ended up entering it by hand.

As Jules Jones points out it does have the one advantage that it is an off site storage of the list if you have insurance.

[gomeza.livejournal.com]

What happens when the website goes away? Seems like an okay idea for a backup, but if I were ambitious enough to catalog all my books, I'd just use a simple database at home - very easy to do with something like FileMaker Pro or other tools.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Well it does allow export as tab delimited text for Excel files. And it does pull information using ISBN or barcodes (if you've got a scanner) from Library of Congress and other databases of books so you don't have to enter in every book by hand. It's mainly just frustrating me because I have so many books without ISBNs or that are weird editions not in the LoC.