Tag your books with Library Thing

Writing about Etsy yesterday got me fired up on tagging again, so I am going to write about at least two tagging sites tonight that I’ve been testing. The first is Library Thing, which is turning into quite a nice service for tagging your real-world books.

Registration is simple - give it a username and a password. No other personal information is requested. Adding books is just as easy. So many people are using Library Thing (they recently accounced they had 1 million tags) now that a simple search on an author or title will most likely pull the book up, which can be added to your catalog with a single click. You can also input ISBNs if you like. Quickly add tags, a rating and a review if you like. It’s fast and easy to add books and metadata.

Library Thing is free for up to 200 books, with a premium service for more books. I love the last sentence in their FAQ for pricing:

At present, a free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. A paid account allows you to catalog any number of books. Paid accounts cost $10 for a year or $25 for a lifetime. I conservatively predict the revenue will enable me to recline all day on an enormous pile of gold.

Library Thing also just released a new feature called “tag info pages” which has lots of information on a given tag. Here’s Fiction, for example.

Listal is another company that does this, although Listal also allows information on dvds, games and music. If you are really into books, go with Library Thing. If you have a big collection of all media, go with Listal. And if you have a mac, use Delicious Library, which lets you scan books in with a digital camera, saving countless hours.

I have a lot of books. And I move a lot, often to other countries. Moving books sucks and so I’ve moved most of them to my parents house in Washington. Since my parents have are retired and have a lot of time on their hands, I’m hoping to get them to do all of the hard work in uploading the initial book data. Dad, how ’bout it?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 12:21 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.