Librarything, the online personal library manager founded by Tim Spalding and co-owned by Abebooks, taught me something about myself: I don’t really care about cataloguing my personal library. Sure, it would be nice if somebody had done it for me, or if all my books had an RFID tag that would automatically keep my catalogue up to date, but I can easily go without a list of what I own.
So what goes on in the minds of those who do like to catalogue their personal library, and what does Librarything do to meet the demands of those people? I find it hard to answer the former, and therefor undoable to answer the latter.
Luckily, if you were already interested in Librarything, there is the free account. Anyone can store up to 200 books in their private database. And although you may own a lot more, once you hit a couple of dozen books entered you start getting a feel what Librarything can mean for you. Even if you decide that this is not the PLM for you, you can export your data to a tab delimited file and take it elsewhere (through the oddly named Joy menu). The only thing you’ll lose this way is the cover images you collected.
Creating the free account is trivially easy, and akin to creating a Wikipedia account. You enter a new username and password in the login box, and if the username does not exist yet, a new account is created. The very next thing you should do is go to Your Profile, then Edit Your Profile, and fill out your e-mail address. If you don’t do this, and you lose your account data, you may lose access to your database.
Filling up 200 entries takes somewhere between an hour and dozens of hours; you’ll know soon enough if you really want to continue with this library thing.
Librarything has enough members to fill a province’s or state’s capital. In other words: enough people who get it. Connecting people is a big part of what Librarything is, and I was glad to see that it is not being overly proprietary about it; if you’ve written a review, you can host it elsewhere and link to it from the book page. I have written before why I think this is a good idea. The site has forums where you can talk about books and about itself, and it uses special tags to reference the book and author databases in your discussions.
E-books and The Thing
I haven’t delved into what it means to catalogue e-books in Librarything, yet that may be where its weak point is. The site’s software does make a distinction between works and copies, but it records your ownership of copies, which in the case of e-books may not carry much meaning; as member of the public I own all of Project Gutenberg’s 20,000+ e-texts, yet recording that fact in Librarything is well nigh useless.
If the site could improve in one aspect therefore, it is in recording what a certain copy or artefact means to you. It already allows you to record when you have started and finished a book, but it could take that a step further. What else have you done with the book? As Cory Doctorow says in his revolutionary essay “Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books”, a book is a practice, “a collection of social and economic and artistic activities”. This becomes more important when owning the artefact loses its meaning.
Scaling problems
Librarything relies heavily on ISBNs. If all your books have ISBNs, and all these ISBNs are known to Librarything, building your catalogue will be a pretty smooth process. But even when the system doesn’t know about a few of your ISBNs, the work can become pretty painful. Librarything will tell you that it could not find a number of ISBNs, but it won’t tell you which numbers it could not find. You will have to go through your entire fresh catalogue to find out which books are missing.
The problem with scale became even more apparent to me, because I own a lot of old and a lot of Dutch books that the system doesn’t know about. I would enter the textual data for a bunch of books, then scan their covers, then upload those scans. I had to keep track of the books I had done, because Librarything would not tell me which covers I had not yet uploaded: the column with covers is the only one that cannot be sorted in your catalogue view.
Interface problems
Librarything in its current state comes across as being made by well-meaning, but amateur web developers. Since Tim Spalding labels himself as a (professional?) web developer, I have to assume that the site is still very much a work in progress. As you can see from the screenshot above, menu items do not collapse gracefully, so that you are more or less forced to keep the browser window at a certain minimum width. When I tested the site, discussion threads would open in different tabs on CTRL-clicks, but the current tab would also open the thread, so that I had to use the back key. Further more, an Entirely Good Thing like the entries unread notification would get blanked upon opening a thread in a new tab. Basically this means you have to pretend you’re using IE with all its short-comings when visiting Librarything’s forums.
These are indeed very minor problems, but they do little to increase my trust in the site. Are these problems the result of the site not being finished, or of a lack of attention to detail?
Try for yourself
As I have shown, it is trivially easy to try out Librarything yourself; it does take a little time to do so, but even if you were to conclude that Librarything is not the PLM for you, the site still allows you to export most of your data if so desired. Also there are thousands of Thingers that will help you understand whether this particular catalogue/community is the one you were looking for.
See also: other Teleblog items about Librarything.
I love Library Thing, although you’re right, it doesn’t necessarily help inventory management for ebooks.
Interestingly, there’s a way to import your amazon purchases en masse into the system. (check the FAQ).
The lesson we learn from this is that an ebook website should have the ability to display bookmarks/favorites to share with other people.
I must say I agree with Branko about my lack of enthusiasm for making an inventory of my library. I decided to to prepare a “bibliography” of my academic textbooks so I could cut & paste the information into essay footnotes, but that was mainly to save time & energy (and present the details in an accepted format). After all, I know where all my books are and what is in them (I think!). The E-books are harder to keep in order, does anyone know a good program to catalogue the files on a CD or DVD?
I used LibraryThing to catalogue my Mum’s book collection – she had books spread over three rooms, sometimes stacked on the shelves two deep, and some with almost-illegible spines. Some of those books had “family” importance, some books had already been passed down to other family members, some hadn’t, and it was getting difficult to know exactly what was there, and where it was. LibraryThing sorted it.
It’s the best at what it does, it’s free, and it’s not locked into a major vendor like MS or Amazon who might screw it up at some future date for corporate advantage.
The one criticism that I’d agree with (in 2009) is that LT really ought to also be able to catalogue CDs and DVDs, too. These things have product barcodes too, and it’d be great to be able to have books, CDs and DVDs all cataloguable under one umbrella, rather than having to use two or three different sites and interfaces.