When I first saw LibraryThing I immediately thought of Flixster, which is a similar website, but for films. I have a humongous list of films on there, all with reviews and a star rating:
However I'm over a year's behind on that so I don't see myself doing any better with LibraryThing, especially as I don't think it's as good as Flixster, either the main website or the Facebook application. LibraryThing's layout is simplistic in style, complicated in structure and frankly unattractive; if you're anything like me or your book collection is like mine, it will take you a while to build up your list of books, so you're gonna have to
want to spend the time on the website. I would have to do a lot of customising to get my profile and homepage the way I need them. The search function is overly convoluted; basically you have to do two searches, one using the LibraryThing search and the other often limited to the website chosen to import from. Downloading the book profiles from elsewhere is necessary, I chose Amazon due to the pretty pictures, but it causes problems; it timed out several times while searching. The zeitgeist tab is useful, but not obvious enough, I only found it just as I was about to give up; it should be the first port of call. That might've been my fault though... Anyway, that's enough of a rant. Here is my LibraryThing list:
It's taken up with all my Alias spin-off books at the moment, mainly as they're the only ones I know I definitely have, but also to promote my favourite TV series. Everyone should check it out and for those who know nothing about it, you can't go wrong with a sci-fi spy show with a spectacular female role model as the heroine. If that isn't enough, it was created by J. J. Abrams who's the genius behind Lost, Mission Impossible 3 and the new Star Trek.
The season one cast, makes me all nostalgic. Yes, that is Bradley Cooper at the... back to the point. The other problem with LibraryThing is that most people don't know what books they have; film reviewing is a lot easier, I should know I've written film reviews for websites, for the Cambridge Film Festival and reviewed films on community radio. My books are scattered across two houses and five separate rooms: my bedroom and living room, and my old bedroom, the computer room and the loft at my parent's house. Problematic. Then there is the subject of editions, which edition of Jane Eyre do I have? Short of going to my bookshelf and digging out the ISBN, I won't know. It's partly my fault as I'm a perfectionist, I suppose most people would choose the first one on the list rather than the exact one. In my eyes, that defeats the object. Or is that we build a library of books that we've read but don't own? which would be frankly ridiculous. So in that case, the only application I can see for it, is on a professional basis. Which is the reason why we're looking at it. However, Cambridge already has a list of all the books in our libraries; the Newton catalogue makes LibraryThing superfluous if not for the reviews, which we can go to Amazon for anyway. I gather it can recommend books either from your list, or from individual books, but I'm always a bit wary about that as what factors are being used for the recommendations? Of those libraries that do use LibraryThing already, the Central Science library lists only 95 books out of how many? And of those libraries that have integrated it into their catalogues, almost all of them are in the US. There's literally a handful in the UK and another few in Ireland. I feel I'm missing the point on this one. Here's a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon:
However I'm over a year's behind on that so I don't see myself doing any better with LibraryThing, especially as I don't think it's as good as Flixster, either the main website or the Facebook application. LibraryThing's layout is simplistic in style, complicated in structure and frankly unattractive; if you're anything like me or your book collection is like mine, it will take you a while to build up your list of books, so you're gonna have to want to spend the time on the website. I would have to do a lot of customising to get my profile and homepage the way I need them. The search function is overly convoluted; basically you have to do two searches, one using the LibraryThing search and the other often limited to the website chosen to import from. Downloading the book profiles from elsewhere is necessary, I chose Amazon due to the pretty pictures, but it causes problems; it timed out several times while searching. The zeitgeist tab is useful, but not obvious enough, I only found it just as I was about to give up; it should be the first port of call. That might've been my fault though... Anyway, that's enough of a rant. Here is my LibraryThing list:
It's taken up with all my Alias spin-off books at the moment, mainly as they're the only ones I know I definitely have, but also to promote my favourite TV series. Everyone should check it out and for those who know nothing about it, you can't go wrong with a sci-fi spy show with a spectacular female role model as the heroine. If that isn't enough, it was created by J. J. Abrams who's the genius behind Lost, Mission Impossible 3 and the new Star Trek.
The season one cast, makes me all nostalgic. Yes, that is Bradley Cooper at the... back to the point. The other problem with LibraryThing is that most people don't know what books they have; film reviewing is a lot easier, I should know I've written film reviews for websites, for the Cambridge Film Festival and reviewed films on community radio. My books are scattered across two houses and five separate rooms: my bedroom and living room, and my old bedroom, the computer room and the loft at my parent's house. Problematic. Then there is the subject of editions, which edition of Jane Eyre do I have? Short of going to my bookshelf and digging out the ISBN, I won't know. It's partly my fault as I'm a perfectionist, I suppose most people would choose the first one on the list rather than the exact one. In my eyes, that defeats the object. Or is that we build a library of books that we've read but don't own? which would be frankly ridiculous. So in that case, the only application I can see for it, is on a professional basis. Which is the reason why we're looking at it. However, Cambridge already has a list of all the books in our libraries; the Newton catalogue makes LibraryThing superfluous if not for the reviews, which we can go to Amazon for anyway. I gather it can recommend books either from your list, or from individual books, but I'm always a bit wary about that as what factors are being used for the recommendations? Of those libraries that do use LibraryThing already, the Central Science library lists only 95 books out of how many? And of those libraries that have integrated it into their catalogues, almost all of them are in the US. There's literally a handful in the UK and another few in Ireland. I feel I'm missing the point on this one. Here's a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon:
