A glimpse into my library

While it may be true that no one has ever owned a library the size of the Library of Congress, this is based on a technicality. When the Library of Congress was created, Thomas Jefferson suddenly had no books.

I suspect my library is nowhere near the size TJ’s was, but I am slowly entering the books into LibraryThing. I learned about this site from CasaChristy. Some have referred to it as MySpace for booklovers, as there are a few social-networking features, such as Discussion Groups, and the ability to leave comments on someone’s profile, unless they turn that option off.

They have a list of authors, with LibraryThings. Science Fiction author, Elizabeth Bear is one of them. (according to the LibraryThing Blog, she was their 100th author.)
So far I have entered slightly over 70 of my books. I can enter up to 200 on a free account, but I can enter an unlimited amount if I am willing to pay $10/yr, or $25 for a lifetime account. I’ll take it for a test-drive and see how often I’m logging in before I decide whether to pay.

On the left you will see the covers of 12 of my books. It’s a random selection, so if you refresh the page, you will see a different set. (Though, naturally, there might be some overlap.) There are links to Amazon, and if you follow the link, and buy the book, I actually will get a small %.

One feature is the ability to tag each book with any number of self-created tags. So each individual gets to decide how they will ‘catalog’ their books. I know that might actually excite a couple of my librarian friends. Briefly I considered a “classics” category, but decided that was way-too subjective.

Currently, my two largest categories are poetry (with 21 books) and translation (with 20).

The biggest issue I have found so far, is an overloaded server that will often give ‘LibraryThing is temporarily offline, back in 5 minutes’ msgs.