Thursday, November 15, 2007
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Listing your books online
Nearly a year ago, in this post I extolled the virtues of Library Thing, a site that gives interesting book suggestions (and "unsuggestions") based on statistics of users' libraries.

Well, we have now finally decided to bite the bullet and start recording the contents of our own library there as well. I must admit this has become a bit of an obsession in the Dunce house (who would have thought?!), but there's a long way to go. Despite the handy options to find books easily (looking up by ISBN using Amazon, Library of Congress or quite a few other databases) it's still taking us a long time. Mainly due to UK editions which don't always come up on Amazon or any of the others we've tried. So we're still working on our first room, the dining room. The main consequence of this is that cookbooks are relatively over-represented at the moment.

It gives all kinds of interesting information; perhaps the most interesting to us at the moment is the number of users who have a particular book in their collection (although this may not be exactly right due to variations in titles, editions etc. For example I find it extremely hard to believe that only two Libray Thing users have a copy of "Wrestling's Heels and Heroes", or that nobody but us has the Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics), and also the other books owned by people whose libraries are similar to ours so far.

Our catalog is visible to public view here, although please note that we have a long, long way to go before it will be complete. So don't use this as a definitive guide to gift book selection. Especially if the good book stores near our workplaces keep trying to clear out their second-hand books (I think we are +5 in the last couple of days for this reason).

Rumors that we are planning to convert the attic into a library are not completely true.

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Thursday, November 15, 2007 12:11:19 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [2]  |  Related posts:
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Wednesday, November 21, 2007 12:45:53 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Tell me this: what are the 2 #s separated by a / in the "Shared" column? And what is the "only partly true" part about converting the attic into a library?
Big Mama
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 10:19:32 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
The first number is how many LibraryThing users have that book in their collection, and the second number is how many LibraryThing users have written a review for it. So for example, Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" (2883/23 at the moment) is owned by 2883 people, and has 23 reviews on the site. Or for a somewhat less popular example, Jean Durkee's "Tout de Suite a la Microwave II: Mexican, Italian and French recipes" is owned by 3 people and has no reviews on the site (I think we have it because one of Mrs Dunce's relatives met the author on a cruise and could not politely avoid leaving with a copy).

Converting the attic into a library is only partly true because we have bold plans of converting the attic, but not into a library.
Dunce
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