LibraryThing Redux

I wrote about LibraryThing in 2005 when I first discovered it. I was excited because it seemed like an easy way to create a catalog of my books, something I had dabbled with in various ways in the past (using paper notebooks, HyperCard on the Mac, even Excel). It was always too much work to enter the data after just a handful of books, but LibraryThing gave you lots of ways to do that, like copying the book info from the database of Amazon or the Library of Congress or of a LibraryThing user with similar interests (it also has a bit of bookish social networking flavor).

Alas, even that apparently became too hard (can I really be that lazy?), or more likely, I moved on to another obsession or three after a few weeks. Tonight I spent a little time adding some books that I had reviewed in my blog (I even pasted in the URL of the review for some of them), but I still have only 483 books in my LibraryThing catalog, and I must own at least 3,000 books (probably more, many have been in boxes for years).

This renewed interest was actually inspired by a LibraryThing email newsletter that came today. It mentioned a new LibraryThing "widget" which is installed in the column to the right, below my Flickr "mini slide show" widget. For now at least. I like the animated book cover display but I worry that it will remind me of a book I will feel compelled to finally read (or reread). I'm also worried that this is something I'm worried about. There must be something much more important that I should be worrying about.