My favorite things — Librarything.com

“Social networking for book lovers” sounds like a unnecessarily focused take on an already glutted phenomenon. “Social cataloging web application” sounds a little too cold and technical. “Great website” works just fine, though.

I joined Librarything.com (for free!) a little over two years ago. I was looking for an electronic way to catalog my rapidly growing book collection, since conventional methods do not mesh with my Swiss-cheesed brain. On that level — simple cataloging — the site works well; you can list all of your books using title searches, ISBN, Amazon.com links, and so on. Then you can arrange them in countless ways.

But the beauty of Librarything, though, comes when you dig a little deeper. Users can tag books with phrases, and you can search through your library. For instance, I label all of the books that I own but haven’t read yet as “unread.” Thanks to labels, I know I have 248 unread books (247 when I finally slog through this Umberto Eco novel), and I also have 24 short story collections. But while I labeled Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep as “hard-boiled,” I can see that other users have tagged it with “California,” “detective” and “paperback.”

Since it’s a social site, users can upload book covers, add information about different editions of books, write reviews, see who else has similar collections. You can dig through friends’ books collections and discover new reads, get free advance copies from publishers and trade books with other users. The developers keep adding more features, and the site also boasts a vibrant user community.

While the Internet won’t replace physical books anytime soon, it sure has made acquiring books a whole lot easier.

Jason Panella

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