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Longtime LT user here. It is primarily a cataloging service. Catalogue your library and make it easily searchable and organizable with extensive tagging. They p

by Sorion 7y ago

Longtime LT user here. It is primarily a cataloging service. Catalogue your library and make it easily searchable and organizable with extensive tagging. They previously charged for logging more then 200 books in a year I believe. The real highlight of the LT service is the forums. There are forums for almost every reading genre and specialty book collecting genre. Some of the most knowledgeable people about books reside in those forums. How did LT survive? Because it and Goodreads are inherently different services. Someone else described their usage of it and the differences between them perfectly when they said that they keep track of what they have read in Goodreads and what they own in LT. Plus LT has forums as I said and Goodreads cannot compare with their commenting system and the communities created in LT.

irrational 7y ago
I own thousands of books. I think I'd rather read more books than catalog what I own ;-) Too bad this didn't exist decades ago.
- oska 7y ago
  With a barcode scanner it shouldn't take you long to catalogue even thousands of books (disregarding the pre-barcode ones).
  - hanche 7y ago
    The barcode on paperbacks is usually UPC, not ISBN (unless it has changed in recent years). And therein lies a big problem: UPCs get recycled. I was bitten by this when I scanned a bunch of old Sci-Fi books, only to discover that totally different titles got assigned to those UPCs later.
    - stevekemp 7y ago
      By coincidence yesterday evening I decided to start scanning my books with an Android application I'd come across during random surfing. I figured if I picked a bookshelf at random and could enter all the books without a problem I'd do the whole house. As it turned out a random bookshelf had about 60% success rate. I knew that I have some books without ISBN entries, and some that have got barcodes covered in stickers, etc, but I didn't expect it to be such a hard job. I guess every decade or two I try auditing books and I never get very far. I should just pay a student to enter them into an online CRUD application and be done with it..
    - Tomte 7y ago
      Unfortunately, ISBNs also get recycled. They shouldn't be (I think it's actually against the ISBN rules), but it happens.
    - dhosek 7y ago
      That's mostly older commercial paperbacks that have UPC instead of ISBN barcodes. I think nearly everything published since the 90s has an ISBN barcode.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      When I scanned my books with LibraryThing (more than a decade ago now) with one of those CueCats I had lying around as my barcode scanner at the time (now the LT iOS and Android apps can act as a barcode scanner), the primary data source was (and still is, I believe) Amazon's database which has a very good idea of paperback UPC codes to ISBNs from their used book sales. In the average case you'd just have to pick between two or three alternatives, and in the worst case that Amazon had very few used sales of that book just text search some other source (and LibraryThing is rife with all sorts of really cool catalog data sources).
- angrygoat 7y ago
  I've got 1050 books all catalogued in LibraryThing. I find it quite worthwhile – I can search my library, useful if you have an extensive reference collection on a particular topic. And if I'm out at a bookshop wondering if I have a book already, I can check! :)
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    A true collector would buy the book regardless. The duplicates are part of the character of the collection. If you like a book that much, gift the extra.
pjmorris 7y ago
Long time, sometime, user of LT. Short on shelf space, I've moved to storing (~800) books in boxes. I label each box, and add it as a collection in LT. The books stay out of the way, but I can easily find one when I need it.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Thanks for the idea. My parents just moved so all my boxes of books are now scattered around my condo and I'm going to have to figure out what to shelve on limited shelf space, what to cull, and what I can fit in limited storage space. This process would be faster if I had tagged the boxes the first time (and the last cull) a decade ago. (It is all in LT, just not organized to the box level, though I've been lax about adding new books since, given the majority of purchases since have been virtually shelved [e-books].) I've long joked I wish there was a storage company devoted to personal libraries, a "Rent-a-Library". There's so many storage companies that are just ugly warehouses full of what are just storage sheds, imagine a place full of shelves and comfy chairs, and maybe good librarians to dust, alphabetize your section, greet you, and maybe even hush you for being too loud for old times sake. (I feel that need less now, given how many of my books are e-books now, but it's still a good idea I think.)
  - pjmorris 7y ago
    > I've long joked I wish there was a storage company devoted to personal libraries, a "Rent-a-Library". I've long had a similar thought, though not as user-friendly as yours, just the book storage part, not the reading room part. Some combination of LibraryThing, storage boxes, storage units, and shipping companies, managed to make book storage, retrieval, and sharing, convenient and reliable for its users. I think the only novel thought that I've had on the topic would be that the charge for not returning a book that was shared with you would be some base processing fee (say $5) in addition to the cost of repurchasing the book.

by Sorion 7y ago

irrational 7y ago

I own thousands of books. I think I'd rather read more books than catalog what I own ;-) Too bad this didn't exist decades ago.

oska 7y ago
With a barcode scanner it shouldn't take you long to catalogue even thousands of books (disregarding the pre-barcode ones).
- hanche 7y ago
  The barcode on paperbacks is usually UPC, not ISBN (unless it has changed in recent years). And therein lies a big problem: UPCs get recycled. I was bitten by this when I scanned a bunch of old Sci-Fi books, only to discover that totally different titles got assigned to those UPCs later.
  - stevekemp 7y ago
    By coincidence yesterday evening I decided to start scanning my books with an Android application I'd come across during random surfing. I figured if I picked a bookshelf at random and could enter all the books without a problem I'd do the whole house. As it turned out a random bookshelf had about 60% success rate. I knew that I have some books without ISBN entries, and some that have got barcodes covered in stickers, etc, but I didn't expect it to be such a hard job. I guess every decade or two I try auditing books and I never get very far. I should just pay a student to enter them into an online CRUD application and be done with it..
  - Tomte 7y ago
    Unfortunately, ISBNs also get recycled. They shouldn't be (I think it's actually against the ISBN rules), but it happens.
  - dhosek 7y ago
    That's mostly older commercial paperbacks that have UPC instead of ISBN barcodes. I think nearly everything published since the 90s has an ISBN barcode.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    When I scanned my books with LibraryThing (more than a decade ago now) with one of those CueCats I had lying around as my barcode scanner at the time (now the LT iOS and Android apps can act as a barcode scanner), the primary data source was (and still is, I believe) Amazon's database which has a very good idea of paperback UPC codes to ISBNs from their used book sales. In the average case you'd just have to pick between two or three alternatives, and in the worst case that Amazon had very few used sales of that book just text search some other source (and LibraryThing is rife with all sorts of really cool catalog data sources).
angrygoat 7y ago
I've got 1050 books all catalogued in LibraryThing. I find it quite worthwhile – I can search my library, useful if you have an extensive reference collection on a particular topic. And if I'm out at a bookshop wondering if I have a book already, I can check! :)
- lonelappde 7y ago
  A true collector would buy the book regardless. The duplicates are part of the character of the collection. If you like a book that much, gift the extra.

pjmorris 7y ago

Long time, sometime, user of LT. Short on shelf space, I've moved to storing (~800) books in boxes. I label each box, and add it as a collection in LT. The books stay out of the way, but I can easily find one when I need it.

WorldMaker 7y ago
Thanks for the idea. My parents just moved so all my boxes of books are now scattered around my condo and I'm going to have to figure out what to shelve on limited shelf space, what to cull, and what I can fit in limited storage space. This process would be faster if I had tagged the boxes the first time (and the last cull) a decade ago. (It is all in LT, just not organized to the box level, though I've been lax about adding new books since, given the majority of purchases since have been virtually shelved [e-books].) I've long joked I wish there was a storage company devoted to personal libraries, a "Rent-a-Library". There's so many storage companies that are just ugly warehouses full of what are just storage sheds, imagine a place full of shelves and comfy chairs, and maybe good librarians to dust, alphabetize your section, greet you, and maybe even hush you for being too loud for old times sake. (I feel that need less now, given how many of my books are e-books now, but it's still a good idea I think.)
- pjmorris 7y ago
  > I've long joked I wish there was a storage company devoted to personal libraries, a "Rent-a-Library". I've long had a similar thought, though not as user-friendly as yours, just the book storage part, not the reading room part. Some combination of LibraryThing, storage boxes, storage units, and shipping companies, managed to make book storage, retrieval, and sharing, convenient and reliable for its users. I think the only novel thought that I've had on the topic would be that the charge for not returning a book that was shared with you would be some base processing fee (say $5) in addition to the cost of repurchasing the book.