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Wednesday, October 05, 2005

 

That Library Thing

Oh. My. God.

I have not been this excited about the Internet since I 'discovered' blogging. Have you seen that Library Thing? It's an online catalogue where you can store all your book titles in one spot.

Let's back up a minute and examine what we know about Danigirl:

(1) She loves books.
(2) She loves collecting books almost as much as she loves reading books.
(3) She is an obsessive bean counter at heart.
(4) She is incapable of wandering more than 20 feet away from her computer for more than three hours at a stretch.
(5) She is an inveterate exhibitionist, and her favourite game is "I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

Wrap up all these qualities into a box, put a lovely ribbon on it, and make it ridiculously easy to use and painfully addictive, and you have that Library Thing.

I spent an hour and a half last night feeding two shelves of my favourite books into Library Thing's database. Fifty-eight books down, 600 to go. Okay, maybe I'll get bored and lose interest before I get to the cartons of pulp paperbacks stashed in the closet. But probably not.

And - did I mention they provide a blog trick? Books, beancounting and BLOG TRICKS, you say? Can you believe how cool it is? Now you can see five random titles from my library each time you drop by, right there in the sidebar below the word of the day.

You've got to try it! I thought it was a pretty neat trick until I actually tried to add a book... then I was hopelessly smitten. All you do is key in a couple of key search terms, and the database populates the rest of the information for you. It's a tool for bookloving, bean-counting, blog-tricking LAZY people - it's uncanny, I tell you.

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