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Librarything lets users catalogue their own books
November 16, 2005 | 5:14 pm
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By Branko Collin
![[Slice of a screenshot of Librarything]](http://www.teleread.com/team//libthing.png)
The past few days I have come across the name LibraryThing quite a few times, though only today I thought I’d take a peek. LibraryThing is an online book cataloguing application that not just lets users enter the books they own, but uses it to make a super catalogue. It has all the Web-2.0-y things like user participation, distribution of work, tags, Long Tails, et cetera. If founder Tim Spalding managed to slap on a Creative Commons license somewhere, he could retire.
Started in August of this year, the shared catalogue (dubbed the Flickr for books) has amassed almost 11,000 users who together have entered over 800,000 books (more than 400,000 unique titles). The site’s software taps into Amazon and Library of Congress databases, and lets you post reviews of books. (Although I personally would prefer a Technorati for reviews.)
LisNews on LibraryThing: Who Needs Catalogers When You Have LibraryThing?, LibraryThing Takes a Page From Deli.cio.us, and Another Thing on LibraryThing. Plus some more buzz linked from the site itself.
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Comments:
I like the concept of LibraryThing, but I don’t see support for the most important thing: the ability to export your own personal data/tags into an offline database/spreadsheet/xml file. I know it does more, but my main need is a personal book catalog which I can keep on my pda (and which is accessible on the web).
Unlike the flickr people (who assiduously opened their APIs and explicitly tackled the export/import problem from the very start, I don’t see much information about how to import/export data. What’s the use of this data if you can’t bring it with you?