librarything is awesome

I've been playing around with Librarything tonight, and it is really amazing.

It's a website where you can scan in your whole library of books by ISBN, and it tracks it all for you.

Isn't this like delicious library, or mediaman, or X, you ask? No, not really. It's got a LOT more data. It's done Web 2.0 style so you can tag each of your books. This comes in really handy for things like "loaned" or "read/unread" or even "library/office" for location, etc. The tags are totally up to you.

It's also got a mobile interface so I can be in a bookstore and verify my home library that I don't have a book before I purchase it.

I can make my whole library available to the world, like so:

My Library

And you can all look at my books, ask if you can borrow one you haven't read, etc. If you guys join up, you can add each other to your 'watch list', which is the equivalent of 'friending'. Let me know your username if you do.

There's some really cool features too, like looking at my author cloud, which shows that a) I'm an enormous nerd, and b) I haven't gotten past G in my fiction categorizing.

They also collect a lot of cool statistics, which will be more useful once I've tagged and entered more, but it's fun to see how many of my books were written in each decade, etc.

Also, importantly, you can get your data out in any number of ways, exported as CSV, RSS feeds, you name it. So I won't be locked in like with some of those other solutions.

I've entered two bookshelves of books so far, with several left to go. What's hilarious is my technical books took about 10 minutes with a cuecat, boop boop boop and they were all done. My fiction books are HELL. Any of my sci fi books from before 1980 don't have bar codes, so I have to hand type ISBNs, and even then a lot of books don't even have that, so I have to look them up by title and try to find the right edition. But thank god I'll only have to do it once.

The only thing I can't quite get my head around is ONLY relying on tagging. I yearn for more data columns. I want a column for "loaned" with the person's name. I want a column for "read/unread" with checkboxes, so I can quickly go through my whole library and click the ones I've read so I know which I haven't. Tags SUCK for speed. I don't want to have to edit each book and paste in the word "read", I want to click a checkbox. I know this is the new, modern way of doing things, but it still isn't good for speedy usage.

My big wishlist is, do things other than books. I've got bar codes on my DVDs and games and CDs, and they can be looked up at Amazon. Why isn't this being supported? I assume it's coming, that'd be a huge oversight to just focus on books, instead of categorized media. You've already done the work to tie to Amazon, this should just happen.

Check it out, and let me know your username if you end up using it.