So many books...

Many thanks to Shocho for his LibraryThing tip. I've been wanting to catalog my library but daunted by the prospect of entering all that information into FileMaker or Excel for the thousand or more (probably a lot more) books scattered around six rooms and Lord knows how many bookcases. This website is just what I need -- by typing up a text list of just ISBNs, I can import them into LibraryThing which miraculously pulls in the titles, authors, publishers, and in many cases the covers from Amazon.com, the Library of Congress, and other sources. So far I've got 430 books cataloged (which means my total is probably closer to 1500 than 1000), only a handful of which I had to enter by hand. I expect to get my cataloging done before New Year's Eve. If I'd had to do it all by hand, well, I'd probably never have gotten to it at all. It's got subject tags, too, which probably takes more time to enter than actually getting the books into the catalog. You can export your entire catalog as a spreadsheet if you want to do some special formatting or sorting beyond what LibraryThing can do, or just as a backup.

Oh, yeah, I should mention that you can only enter 200 books for free, and as Kathy pointed out on Shocho's blog, anyone who'd be interested in cataloging their books like this in the first place undoubtedly has way more than 200 books. But beyond that it's a measly $10 per year (or $25 to spring for a lifetime membership) for unlimited entries. After entering a little over 100, I knew I was going to want to do the whole shebang, so I sent off my ten bucks via PayPal without a second thought. It's well worth less than a buck a month to any bibliophile.

My tag cloud informs me that my top categories so far are computer, Star Trek, photography, cookbooks (this represents wishful thinking more than any culinary expertise), and home improvement. This is badly skewed, however, by the fact that I'm entering books by broad categories that are shelved in specific places, and I have yet to get to the room where all the sci-fi and other fiction is shelved. (The Star Trek books listed are mostly of the companion/compendium/chronology/encyclopedia/technical manual/"making of" sort.) So the cloud is going to morph a lot as I proceed through the rest of the house.

If for some inexplicable reason you have a hankering to browse my bookshelves (what I've got cataloged so far, anyway), here's a link, or just go to LibraryThing.com and search for MajorRakal.