Library thing

When my collection of books couldn't fit into the bookcase, they were all over the house and in the boxes. For a long time, I kept thinking that some of them must go, those that I won't read again, and I needed to get a new bookcase, preferably one with glass doors to keep the dust off.

I also wanted to catalog them so that I know when I acquire them, what I have read, what waiting to be read, how I feel about a specific book and the author's writing style, and so forth.

With these two aims in mind, during the Christmas holiday last year, I started shopping for a new bookcase cabinet, finally I settled on the Curio Cabinet in the Townhouse collection from Ethan Allen.

But how am I going to catalog them? I didn't want to use the old-fashioned Excel spreadsheet with its limited functionalities as it has to be stored on a hard drive in my home computer. I wanted a Web application that is accessible from anywere with rich functionalities. The technologist side of me knew there must be something available with Web 2 technology, so I searched the Net. Sure enough, there are quite few web sites offer the services, but I chosed the LibraryThing for its library-quality catalog and its capacity to connect me with people who read the same books.

Now the fun part began, I sorted out all my books into different piles, sent Salvary Army 6 shopping bags of books, and started adding books into my library. As of today, I cataloged 108 books and I am not done yet.

I have the entire collection of Library of Essential Writers published by Barnes & Noble since 2006. It's a collection of classic masterpieces by 28-writers, dated back to the 17th century, whose writings had not only greatly influenced generations of readers and writers, but also had profoundly impacted the Western clutures. It's my goal to read them all, and I found out that I am not alone through LibraryThing.

LibraryThing was developed by Tim Spalding in 2005. The online bookseller AbeBooks bought a 40% share of it in May 2006 for an undisclosed sum, and subsequently in July 2008, the world largest online retailer amazon.com acquired AbeBooks.