LibraryThing

[tamaranth]

better late than never!

People have been enthusing to me about LibraryThing for ages, and I've been meaning to set up an account for ages: and now I have.

So far it's just what I've read this year -- and not all of that, because I haven't quite decided if it's a 'books read' list (like the Review Blog) or a catalogue of the books I currently possess. If the former, it'll exclude the books I read but don't own -- two out of twenty so far this year -- and if the latter, it's going to take some time, because my personal book catalogue isn't in a format that I can import!

It's ever so easy to use, though, and it's probably a better way to organise my reviews than a traditional blog format.

And perhaps this'll supersede my venerable Access book database, one day ...

Comments

[ramtops.livejournal.com]

I have (nearly) all of our books in Bookpedia, a Mac app. And our DVDs in DVDPedia, come to that. It exports in a nice CSV format, so I'm in the process of putting them on my personal site (http://www.kestrel.org). The DVDs are on, and the books are in the database, but I have more to do before I can publish them.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

My little Access applet exports to CSV and Excel -- but I confess I like the way that LibraryThing pulls in covers and dates and the like. Publishing a list of what I have, somewhere, is relatively straightforward, and I already blog about what I've read. (Not 100% crossover, what with books borrowed from friends and books so bad that I can't bear to keep 'em!)

I'm going to see how I get on with LibraryThing in terms of the community, the interaction and the toys. I won't be replacing the Access db just yet, but I don't rule it out: LT can export to CSV, and I'd get a lot more info than I currently hold ... if I ever get around to entering the whole collection ... If only I'd typed in all those ISBNs I could import it direct!

[ramtops.livejournal.com]

oh, I've done the pulling in images and stuff by using Amazon Web Services; that's really why I did it - as a learning exercise :) Some of it is written to a database, and the rest is captured on the fly from Amazon. I do grab the image if there is one (via an HTTP grab into a directory), because I wanted to be able to resize them at will to my own requirements, but it's entirely automated - I just bung in the ISBN and ColdFusion does the rest.

I'm dead chuffed quite pleased with it all, really :)