Library Thing

Greetings from The Big Beluga

At the bottom the blog page you will see that there are several books randomly selected from the library of The Big Beluga. Library Thing is a type of social networking service that allows you to enter books that you have read, review them and apply tags etc.

The Big Beluga has personally checked out a few of these internet services. They all typically have a look-up feature that allows you to enter a title or author and then search for the particular book you want to add. In this way all of the bibliographic information goes into a database with a minimum of effort, these can be later downloaded as a text file, which can be very convenient. Most services allow you to try them out for free by limiting the number of books in your library, for Library Thing it is 200.

The Social Networking aspect enters in with the tagging and reviews. The software automatically compares the tags, book titles and authors of books in your collection to those of other users. This allows you to compare what books other people with similar interests have read that you have not, also very handy and somewhat similar to the suggestions provided by Amazon when you have an account with them. Of everyone can review books and share reviews. It is possible to search the membership for people with similar interests to your own and send correspondence - within the context of Library Thing, in your typical blog like fashion.

In addition to tracking books read, I thought that it would also be useful to start reviewing them, even with a short summary, so that I can personally keep track of what I have read and those books which I have found valuable. My library currently consists of non-fiction only and I have included audio books because I am increasingly finding them a useful way of covering material that I simply wouldn't have time for otherwise.

I will be cross posting reviews of some books here, but mostly I hope to discuss topics on this blog more than the books themselves.