Keeping track of books, part 2: LibraryThing

As Becky mentioned in a previous post, once your library materials are returned and any late fees paid, the library has no record of your checkouts. That’s great for your privacy, but not so great for your reading list if your brain is like mine and can’t keep track of what you’ve read. Like GoodReads, LibraryThing provides tools for recording a list of your read books and also provides a social reading experience.

LibraryThing does many of the same things that GoodReads does and more:

• You can rate and review books you’ve read. LibraryThing will also show you how many other people have rated a book, what the average rating is, and how many reviews are available for that book.
• LibraryThing uses tags instead of bookshelves, but they work in the same way. You can tag a book as “mystery” or “read” or whatever you choose and if you have multiple books with the same tag, you can view all those books by clicking on the tag.
• You can connect with other readers by joining discussion groups and hear about what they’re reading. Some groups LibraryThing offers are Writer-readers (for those who not only read, but also write), FantasyFans, and Librarians who LibraryThing (where they discuss things like metadata, cataloging, and social software).
• It will create a word cloud of your tags, showing you your most-used tags in a larger font size.
• LibraryThing also has author interviews and pages, contests, and legacy libraries — catalogs of libraries of actors, authors, scientists, presidents, and other historical people.
• LibraryThing has two giveaway programs. Their Early Reviewers program allows you to sign up to get advance readers’ editions of upcoming titles from publishers. You are not required to write a review, but if you receive books and do not review them, you might lessen your chance of being chosen to receive more titles. In their Member Giveaways program, authors and other LibraryThing members give away books. You are not required to write a review for a book you receive, but it is encouraged.

LibraryThing has fun statistics that you might never need to use other than for entertainment. For example:

• It will show you a bar chart comparing your book stack height to things like a hobbit, a pony, or a giraffe.
• Always wondered about the value of your books’ weight in gold? LibraryThing can tell you.
• You can see the percentage of the distance to the moon the pages in your books would make if they were lined up end-to-end.
• One LibraryThing statistic that may come in handy is how many U-haul book boxes you would need if you were packing up your personal library.

Here’s the big negative about LibraryThing: they have different account levels. The free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. Any more than that and you’ll have to pay, but their memberships aren’t too expensive. Their yearly and lifetime membership levels vary by price. The lowest price for which you can purchase a yearly membership is a dollar most people choose to pay $10. The lowest price for which you can purchase a lifetime membership is $19; most people choose to pay $25.

LibraryThing seems more technically oriented than GoodReads, but it does have a good social aspect to it that all readers can enjoy. Plus, who doesn’t enjoy free books?