The book lover in you will love the
LibraryThing. This site allows you to maintain an online catalog of your books. You get to input up to 200 books for free; above that number, you pay $10 per year or a $25 lifetime fee. I’ve paid the 25 bucks already.
Why do I like this site? First, it’s very easy to input your books. You can input the book title or author and the system will search Amazon (or other libraries) to find the ISBN, cover and pertinent information. You do this on the “Add Books” page
here. Or, you can use their universal import form and grab the ISBNs from any web page. You do that
here. This feature I love. Since I tend to buy all the books of my favorite authors, I like to import their entire book list at one time. You can do this by entering the URL of a page that includes all their titles. For example, I do a search
here and then I input the URL of the results page in the univeral import page. In one stroke, I enter all the books for that author.
The second thing I love about this site is that you can look at other people’s libraries. Once you’ve entered your books the system will automatically tell you which books you have in common with other users in the system. Third and last, I like that once I’ve input the books, I can easily download the ISBN and related information. This is important to be because I have a lot of old books that I’ve thought about selling on either
Amazon.com or
Half.com, but I’ve been reluctant to enter them one-by-one. Now, I can just download all the ISBNs from
LibraryThing and upload them into either
Amazon or
Half.com.
You can check out my library
here. It’s by no means complete, (it actually lists some books that I don’ t own), but it’s a start. I would guess that I have over 1000 books so this is going to be a long project. Let me know if you decide to put your library online. We may find that we have a lot of books in common.
Related
Angela Benson
Sounds like a great idea. However, I’ll have to see what I put in here. I made up my own database using Lotus. Then I converted it to MS Access. So far, I’ve got more than 20,000 entries. For some anthologies, I’ve put in every single title quoted from or excerpted. I’ve also got most of the books in there that I’ve ever read. Therefore, the number is not quite that great, i.e., the number of books that I actually have but I’m also a lond way from being finished, so who knows. I might actually have that many when I list all my travel booklets about churches, castles and the like. I don’t know, though, if I’ll ever want to switch it over entirely, especially not at the moment because my hands are causing me a lot of pain from fingertips to back muscles.
I’ll definitely look aroung in it a bit.
Oh, dear. The dogs next door are barking again–and at almost 10:30 p.m. Whenever I go out the door or come up the driveway when they’re out, the two of them throw themselves against the (reinforced) fence. And it seems that trying to make friends with them does *not* work. Well, that was a mercifully short barking session. They must have just been let out for a few minutes.
I’ll have a look at your list to see which books we have in common.
Whew, I’m glad I submitted the comment when I did. My computer just froze on me again while I was looking through your list–at least trying to. I don’t quite have the hang of it yet but I see you have at least some books by Barbara Delinsky, Jude Deveraux, Beverly Jenkins, Nora Roberts, Donna Hill, and, of course, Angela Benson. Those are the authors I remember off-hand. Oh, yes, Walter Moseley (spelling?), too. I won one of his latest from Warner.
Sigrun, I thought I had a lot of books, but you’ve got me beat. I have so many because it’s hard for me to throw them away. A couple of times a year, I’ll make a donation to the library. It’s not all goodwill, unfortunately; I have to get rid of old books so I’ll have some place for the new ones. 🙂
Angela, this is a GREAT tool–definitely a long-term project for me, but I want to use it. It’s worth paying for, just to have an orderly list. I’ve given ALOT of my books away but I probably have close to 1,000 myself. 🙂