After hours of cataloging and typing, my book collection is now entered into LibraryThing. (Well, almost — there are eight books where the ISBN number didn’t work and I’ll have to go back home to get the data so I can enter them in manually.) 638 books (including those eight). Wow — I thought I only had 540 or so.

So, what have I gained from all this? I’ve realized that there are a lot of books I don’t have, and now it’s easy to see what books I want to collect next. I’ve also gotten a lot of dust in my nose.

Last night I spent a couple of hours cataloging my books for entry into LibraryThing. A lot of my books (perhaps even the majority) don’t have ISBNs, having been printed before ISBNs started, and so I get to enter a lot by hand. But it’s fun. And I’m discovering books I’d forgotten I owned, which is always a delightful adventure. I’ve still got a long way to go with cataloging the books, though — several hundred left. That’s what I’ll do tonight and tomorrow.

As far as reading goes, I’m still in Jane Eyre and War and Peace, both of which I’m enjoying heartily. I also finished reading Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a book about graphs and information display. It’s a good read. And I just went to the library and checked out two books that look good: Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write and Mark Robert Waldman’s The Spirit of Writing. It’s been a while since I read any books on writing, but they’re some of my favorites. Books about books and writing and the word make me happy.

Now I just need more time for reading… Right now I’ve got a Music 201 midterm coming up, though, so I probably should be spending my time reading the textbook. ~sigh~

LibraryThing got a sweet deal with Abebooks.com:

LibraryThing is getting a partner. The partner is Abebooks.com, the Canadian company that matches booksellers with booklovers. Abe has taken a minority (40%) share of the company; I retain 60% and majority control. With the financial security and resources Abe brings to the table, LibraryThing’s future looks very bright—increased membership, decent servers and two-three employees working on exciting new features….

I also rejected every offer to swallow, popularize and commercialize LibraryThing—the idea being that if LibraryThing were less about book lovers and what they wanted, and more about video games and “special deals,” it would somehow be more appealing to “regular” people. R-r-right.

And I gave in and bought a lifetime membership (it’s only $25, after all). So now I have to catalog the other 400ish books I have… (Hmm, I don’t think I have any homework due tomorrow… ~devious grin~)

From Library Garden, Rocking Out on Pandora:

What I like best about Pandora (besides the fact that it always seems to play music that I like based upon one suggestion) is their objective to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level”. They really seem to be doing it. How? By assigning a variety of attributes to songs that get at the core of what the music is really about and what people might like about that particular song.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool that was freely available on the web and simple to use that captured “the essence” of books?

FYI, Pandora lets you give it the name of a piece of music you like, and it’ll play other songs that you’ll probably like as well. I haven’t tried it out yet (the cable on my headphones is too short, and so I have to hunch over to listen to anything), but it sounds really cool. It’s based on the Music Genome Project.

So, I’m wondering how much LibraryThing is already doing this. The MGP apparently has over 400 attributes listed, and I doubt LibraryThing is that extensive (at least not yet). It’s a really interesting concept, though, and I think it’s something that ought to be done.

You may have noticed that I’ve added the LibraryThing random books blog widget to the sidebar. Mmm. And on Monday, Tim added language support, so you can say, “This book was originally in Latin, but my copy of it is an English translation.” Very, very cool. I joined the LibraryThing Google group a few days ago, too.

So, now that finals are over, I’ll hopefully have some time soon (like tonight) to finish entering in the rest of my books. Those that have ISBN #s are easy, but a lot of mine were published before ISBNs, and so I’ll have to write it all out by hand. (I don’t have a computer at my apartment now that my laptop’s dead.) But it’s a labor of love, and I don’t really mind.

Now what I need to do is figure out how to access LibraryThing from my cell phone so I don’t buy duplicates when I visit the used bookstores…