How LibraryThing.com Can Help You Find Your Next Favorite Book to Read

Stealing from Your Neighbor's Bookshelf

Soon the days of book discussion groups, forums, and search-engine based boards for posting comments and reviews will be long gone. Sites such as LibraryThing.com offer a buzzing community portal to connect with like-minded readers. Users can create and maintain prolific book lists for the world’s revolving library, offering each user a one-stop virtual bookshelf to share with the world.

LIbraryThing.com is currently a beta site, and lets you create and maintain an up-to-date bookshelf of your favorites and must-haves on the Internet. Right in line with Amazon.com’s infamous reviewer service, LibraryThing.com lets you search and review user recommendations, and populate your shelf accordingly. Group lists and talk functions help you correspond and communicate with other readers on a diverse range of topics, and collaborating ‘live’ book reading groups around the world is not far off.

The Universal Import feature helps you work directly with Amazon.com, making it easier and more efficient to create the Wish List for your newest book collection strategies. The site calls it ‘importing books en masse’ since you can import and upload the database of your book collection easily by title, author, and ISBN number.

Networking with other readers is the centerpiece of LibraryThing.com, since you can check and see how many other people are also taken by your latest copy of The Great Gatsby. A statistical page with ‘obscurity numbers’ ranks your reads with similar interests, and compares your bookshelf with other users of the site. Books are extracted from the lists from Amazon.com, the Library of Congress, and reportedly over 45 additional title-recognition sites.