An Interview with Tim Spaulding, CEO and Founder of LibraryThing.com

Photographers have Flickr. Voyeurs have YouTube. And for the past 3 years bibliophiles have had LibraryThing.com.

This book-sharing site first blasted into the Web on August 29, 2005. Here, the booklover, can catalogue his own library, connect with others, who, unbelievably might have the same books as theirs. They can also tag their books the same way Flickr users tag their photos. Reviews and ratings are encouraged and help the reader enlarge their book fetish.

LibraryThing was listed as one of the top 5 services by PC Magazine in 2006 and Book World called it "one of the Seven Wonders of the Web." These accolades were a pleasant surprise to Tim Spaulding, CEO and Founder of LibraryThing. He would have never foreseen, for example, book czar Abebooks buying 40% of LibraryThing in June of 2006.

Tim Spaulding, founder of LibraryThing recently answered questions about the road to the inception of LibraryThing, his own personal pride, and the future of his site, the Web, and our world. Here's what he said:

ABS: Was Library Thing a light bulb moment - an epiphany? Or did it develop slowly?

TS: I had had the idea some time before, but very much as a fun project, not a company. And it has always been fluid. When I first opened LibraryThing, after three weeks of programming, it did little more than catalog books. There were some other aps out there that did that, but only with Amazon. LibraryThing's first improvement was to be into library data.

I soon saw that the social aspects would also be interesting. Features along the way have developed in fits and starts of creativity. Features like collaborative cataloging, user driven author and work disambiguation, swap and bookstore integration and Library Thing's "talk" feature may have been individually creative, but they emerged from a project I have always considered "clay" not "sculpture". I avoid plans, boxes and arrows, wire frames, schemas, and so forth.

ABS: What obstacles stood in your way as you went about developing the site?