Have You Seen My Library Thing???

As an inveterate reader and bibliophile I was always envious of those people who had their own personal catalog for their personal collections. I knew how to do a database file in Access, but it was so cut and dried...in fact, it was downright boring! Then one day someone turned me on to Library Thing! What a joyous day that was...(you have to know me...)Now I was able to catalog and tag my books...according to my likes and terminologies...I could then search for those books by author, by title, by subject...by my own personalized tags...even by book cover! If I were quite....ummm...anally retentive, I could catalog my books by cover design, color and size. You know, if you've worked in the public library system long enough....someone always comes in with "I don't know who wrote it, or what the title was...and I can't remember the subject, but it was this tall and this thick and it had a red cover"...well...by jiminey...it can be done that way...if you want...all with Library Thing. And the best part is...it's free! Yes...free...well...for the first 200 books it's free. You can buy a years subscription to their service for $10 or you can buy a lifetime subscription for the astronomical price of $25....talk about value for your money...but wait...it gets even better...not only can you catalog YOUR books, you then have access to thousands and thousands of other book geeks around the world and their collections also! But wait!...it gets even better....(can you believe it?)...you can communicate with everyone else (if you make your profile public) and discuss books and authors. There are so many plus's to this site, I could go on for hours...and I have...but not here....You need to stop reading this and head over to librarything.com and check it out for yourself.

It is possibly the absolute best thing to happen to the net...since the net! The only thing...and this is a rather small gripe...the only thing I wish is that there would be a way to save your personal collection of books as a database file...in case of catastrophic failure. I know....'it'll never happen' and it won't because the folks who've put library thing together have done a great job of running it on multiple servers and while it might go down for service or maintenance...there will most likely always be a library thing out there...but the person that I am would love to have my library thing collection on my computer...available whether I was online or off...little thing...I know...but we book geeks are like that!

So go...what are you waiting for??? Go...right now....we'll talk later!!!