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Thursday, June 11, 2009

Online Book Catalogs

I have been using Google Books to catalog the books I've read, but I haven't been real happy with it. There aren't any sorting options, Google doesn't appear to be doing any work to improve it, and now there isn't even a place to report a problem.

So I decided I would try Library Thing. Google books has an export function, so I used that to generate a file which I then used with the import function of Library Thing. Google reports I have 68 books in my library. Library Thing reports that it found 54 books in the import file. What happened to the other 14? And library thing only supports 200 books for free. If you want to catalog more than that, it's going to cost you. It doesn't cost much, it's only $10 a year.

Right now Library Thing is importing my list of books. It estimates that it is going to take an hour to finish processing my list. It scans the import file for ISBN numbers and then sends an inquiry to Amazon to get some information about the book. So we are going to have to wait until that is done before we can do any more fooling around. I'm hungry, now might be a good time to get something to eat.

I just checked on the import process and it's all done. It took less than 15 minutes. That's how long it took me to write this much. A quick look tells me it is probably better than Google Books, but it will be a while before I can say for certain.

I've added a widget to the sidebar that will take you to my library.

2 comments:

Ole Phat Stu said...

WTF? Only 68 books in your library?
Man, I'm at over 8000 and counting!

Still, I've also written more than some people in our village own ;-)

Chuck Pergiel said...

So far I have only been cataloging my new acquisitions. I wanted to try out the catalog program before I went to the trouble to enter all my books in it. I probably have a few hundred books. I would have more, but I used to sell them back to the bookstore when I was done with them.