LibraryThing
Via Alex Barnett, a pointer to LibraryThing.
I walked through the tour and added a book (my catalog), and while there are some pretty cool features I can’t see myself spending the time required to make good use of the tool. Much as it pains me to say, I suppose I’m not enough of a book lover to find it useful. I don’t have enough time to read all the books that I have, and cataloging the hundreds of them would take away precious moments of reading time. I suppose I just don’t see the returns in it for me.
If you were, however, an inveterate reader and in the market for new books, the social/recommendations aspect of the tool might be well worth the effort in keeping your LibraryThing up-to-date. In fact, the tools they provide for entering your books would seem to make updating your catalog fairly trivial, once it’s entered.
I agree whole-heartedly with Alex that the fact you can get your data back out is one of the key features of LibraryThing, and I hope that it’s a sign of things to come when every on-line service will offer that portability. I still like to think that the emerging attention economy will require that behavior on the part of service vendors, though we have a long way to go before that’s true. I also like to see that LibraryThing has a pretty good business model; their tiered subscription model seems to be right on the money - heavy users will probably consume the bulk of their bandwidth in the first year, making the additional $15 for years 2 through ∞ a good deal both for LibraryThing and its users.
A nice feature is the LibraryThing widget. With some juggling around it could be used to supplant the manual addition of the book I’m currently reading to the sidebar of my blog, except that I’d have to start putting books I didn’t own into my catalog, since I don’t always own the book I’m reading.
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