That LibraryThing

Greetings!

You may have noticed something new on this blog. Attached to the left hand side of the page is a randomly generated list of coverart of books in My Library at the LibraryThing website. This is a pretty cool way of putting together a collection of your favorite titles in one place. I could also see where if you wanted to spend the money -- which isn't much, actually-- you could put your entire personal library collection on-line and then be able to know what you own rather than rely on one's memory. The suggeter component makes better suggestions than Amazon (which drives me nuts because I don't want their stupid suggestions ( and I can't seem to figure out how to turn off that feature)) because it looks at a much larger database of titles and can predict what books others who own that title also own ( and therefore probably like). The Unsuggestor isn't quite as useful. The site has been glitchy when I was using it to start entering books into "My Library". And was glitchy again this afternoon. The Library Congress interface seems to be out to lunch today as well. Books I had entered included some, but not all of the Terry Pratchett canon -- this was due to the fact that the link from Amazon.com didn't include all the titles. So the Suggester gave me more Terry Prachett novels that I already knew about. I did come across a couple of authors I have missed in my wanderings, but Randkin, Bill Fitzhugh, and Tom Holt, I already knew about as funny, satiric writers. The Unsuggester didn't seem to work for me. I put in a title I owned or like and it found more titles by the same author. It's a great idea, but it didn't work for me.

Until next time, ciao!