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 Oh that Thing you do
by Patrick Clapp
For a long while now I have been craving an organizational outlet for my modest library. I thought about cataloging each item, faithfully scribing away info on five books a night...thought about it and even did three of them one night before dumping the project into the dusty project bin in the hope that I would one day find the solution automaticca. Since that time I have learned how to write things with the power to scrape book information from the nets and deposit those scrapings into a database. I even learned how to pluck things from the database and make pretty objects...organized and everything. What I lacked were two things: The willpower to code up what I knew, bug free from start to stop, and the desire to collect all those pesky ISBNs to power my scraper.
As chance favors me on occasion, I happened to have a conversation with a close friend who was also interested in such lofty powers of collection and organization. He pointed out some almost working thingies on the net, I wrote back and told him that we really should hit level 70 before we started anything so tangible. What I really desired was a hand scanner that could, at a swipe, snag a bar code, convert it to an ISBN, and save that sometimes alpha-always numeric in a table. And that brings this small tale around to a few weeks ago.
I stumbled across my solution automaticca while surfing around buzzing in and out like a hummingbird (the only bird I know that can fly in reverse). It has everything. Everything and more. "It" is LibraryThing.
Specifically: http://www.librarything.com
It was such a find that I immediately told noone. I quietly ordered their ridiculously affordable and easy to acquire hand scanner for $15. Smoothly made a free account in about 20 seconds. And then proceeded to wait patiently...quietly...trying to get a jump on the pack of rabid bibliophiles that are my friends.
The scanner arrived a week later, and in about as long as it takes to type this sentence, I had 10 books added to my library. My glee was instantaneous. Solution automaticca indeed. Beeep...ding...beeep...ding...I waded through the books in my cubicle at a lightning pace. When I arrived home that night, I spend a merry hour scanning in books before moving on to what I had originally planned for the evening.
The next day I informed my friend of my find...he, of course, has a fully functioning hand scanner, and like me, was very soon off to the races...
And here is why:
Library Thing allows you to have a free account that may contain up to 200 books. For a pittance of $10 a year or (better yet!) $25 once, you can maintain a virtual library with no cap on the number of books it contains. There are some obvious guidelines (such as not going in to your local library or bookstore and scanning everything you can reach). The intent is to capture your library. And with every beeeep of the hand scanner (or manual entry on those very very old books), Library Thing pulls in:
All of the bibliographic data
The cover (or if the cover is not your version or can't be found via Amazon, you can choose from a number that others have uploaded)
And oh so much more...
LibraryThing is a fully functioning folksonomy. Tag to your hearts content. See how many others use a tag that you use. See how many others have the same book that you do. Write or attach links to book reviews. Rate your books on a scale from 1 to 5. Leave comments on a book. Link in to any of the major book swapping sites out there. Form groups, participate in forums, observe your collection as a cloud of authors or a cloud of tags. See all of your covers on one page.
Finally, show off all the nifty nifty books you have, rediscover books you forgot you had, and organize your collection without having to dust, topple, unbox, rebox, reshelf, unshelf, or stress your back in any way.
I invite everyone to check it out. Create a public library, create a private library. Start adding to your collection. Take a look at mine: here. I haven't put everything in there yet because a variety of my stuff is unscannable (manual entry of ISBNs is absolutely uncomplicated). However, I am excited beyond description at the wonderful awesomeness that is Library Thing.
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