Week 7

LibraryThing is our topic of the week this week. I really like LibraryThing and appreciate that you can add reviews to book pages. I have a LibraryThing account for my book review blog that I use to get my reviews "out there" and invite more people visit my blog. You can see my library here. I also really like their Suggester feature, I've found a few good books from using it. When I examined the suggestions for The Year of Yes by Maria Dahvana Headley, a book I really enjoyed; one of the suggestions was Julie and Julia by Julie Powell, a book I definitely did not enjoy. At the same time, they are both memoirs of women who undertake an unusual project for one year and I can see why they would compliment each other.

My problem with any book suggester, like Amazon or LibraryThing is that it lumps books together by publisher in addition to other factors. For a while, both websites were suggesting that I would like a book called Why You're Still Single: Things Your Friends Would Tell You If You Promised Not To Get Mad. I figured that this was because I had Television Without Pity on my lists and they are from the same publisher. I must say that I was a bit insulted, if only briefly, since someone reminded me that an algorithm could not truly know what I wanted to read (or tell me why I'm still single). Google Books is starting a similar application where you can add titles to "My Library" and then search only within the full-text of your library. You can also export your library; Google will give you an XML file for your entire library. This sounds interesting but there's not much else you can do with your library besides search it and share it using code. Hopefully soon users will be able to share their books in other ways like you can with LibraryThing or any other applications.