How LibraryThing.com Can Help You Find Your Next Favorite Book to Read

Soon the days of book discussion groups, forums, and search-engine based boards for posting comments and reviews will be long gone. Sites such as LibraryThing.com offer a buzzing community portal to connect with like-minded readers. Users can create and maintain prolific book lists for the world’s revolving library, offering each user a one-stop virtual bookshelf to share with the world.

LIbraryThing.com is currently a beta site, and lets you create and maintain an up-to-date bookshelf of your favorites and must-haves on the Internet. Right in line with Amazon.com’s infamous reviewer service, LibraryThing.com lets you search and review user recommendations, and populate your shelf accordingly. Group lists and talk functions help you correspond and communicate with other readers on a diverse range of topics, and collaborating ‘live’ book reading groups around the world is not far off.

The Universal Import feature helps you work directly with Amazon.com, making it easier and more efficient to create the Wish List for your newest book collection strategies. The site calls it ‘importing books en masse’ since you can import and upload the database of your book collection easily by title, author, and ISBN number.

Networking with other readers is the centerpiece of LibraryThing.com, since you can check and see how many other people are also taken by your latest copy of The Great Gatsby. A statistical page with ‘obscurity numbers’ ranks your reads with similar interests, and compares your bookshelf with other users of the site. Books are extracted from the lists from Amazon.com, the Library of Congress, and reportedly over 45 additional title-recognition sites.

LibraryThing.com works along the same lines as Digg.com and Furl for users to interact, exchange opinions, and create data lists to share. Catalogs can be private or public, allowing you to create and manage lists according to what you have read, and what may still be on your wishlist. The service does come at a price; members can be $10 for a year, or pay $25 to become a lifetime member. The site reports over 4.5 million books on member bookshelves to date, and the counts are growing.

The catalog offers a graphical representation of the books on your virtual bookshelf, with a colorful depiction of the front covers. Member ratings and keyword tags are created instantly, making it easy to conduct mass searches for similar subjects, topics, and recommendations. The user profile page encourages further interaction with other LibraryThing.com community members, and is an easy way to browse other people’s catalogs.

Want to scour your neighbor’s or best friend’s catalogue for the latest finds? Simply e-mail them your link, and get them on board. LibraryThing.com gives you an instant ‘Top 100’ recommended book list after reviewing your profile for trends, prominent keywords, and subjects. If you happen to be the few left on the planet who still venture into a bookstore, the cell phone feature on LibraryThing.com allows you to download your library for travels; look up the next book to pick up, right at your fingertips.

LibraryThing.com is another reach into the world of online collaboration tools and niche market discussion portals. Blogging and interacting online on specific subjects are growing steadily for thousands of industries online, and book searching is now moving one step further from Amazon.com purchasing. Scouring bookshelves can be faster, more worthwhile, and subject-specific with the tools of tags and keyword search engines; it’s also turning towards creating an entire book discussion experience at