LibraryThing revisited

Categories: Books

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Taking my cue from Jennifer’s announcement that she’s finished updating her LibraryThing catalogue, I’ve gone and done the same thing. You can view the results here.

The steps I took were as follows:

  1. Upgrade to a paid lifetime membership with LibraryThing (US$25 via PayPal).
  2. Export my library data from Delicious Library.
  3. Make my LibraryThing library private.
  4. Upload the library data file using LibraryThing’s import feature.
  5. As the library file uploads (it’s throttled to avoid overloading the library and Amazon servers LibraryThing uses to look up book data), delete duplicate books.
  6. Delete the books that are definitely Jen’s. (We use Delicious Library to manage our combined book collection; LibraryThing is social software, so it’s got a different purpose: because books say something about the person, I want the books I chose to say it.)
  7. Delete the books that I don’t want you to know I have. (Heh.)
  8. Make my library public again.
  9. Spend hours tinkering with each entry — editing fields, choosing cover art, and so forth. Automatic importing is fast, but it’s imprecise; this will probably be a neverending task.
  10. Add a nifty badge to the McWetlog’s sidebar.

One observation during this process: LibraryThing is a lot more feature-rich than it was when I first started using it. It’s come a long way in a short time, and I’m very impressed.

Comments

Jen M., April 24 at 10:20 AM:

571 books, eh? Showoff. ;-)

I’ve been really impressed with the advances made by Library Thing over the last couple months, too. Yer man who runs it seems to spend a lot of time tinkering with and upgrading the various features, which is good. The blog is very useful for keeping up with all those developments.

There is one little glitch I’ve noticed. Alot of my books didn’t have cover art, initially, but you can now go in and select covers, whether from Amazon or from artwork submitted by other users. I was delighted by this and spent a happy evening adding lots of covers where there previously were none. But my LT blog widget doesn’t seem to show non-Amazon covers. Pity, that.

Jonathan Crowe, April 24 at 10:33 AM:

I haven’t noticed that problem with the cover art myself; I’m fairly (but not 100 per cent) certain that user cover art is showing up on my widget — in the sense that books that are appearing are, I think, books for which I’ve selected user cover art — but I’m not sure.

Jonathan Crowe, April 24 at 10:35 AM:

P.S. When you add Jen’s books, and the books the lookup for which failed during the import process (still have to go back and check that), the number is close to a thousand. So there.

Jen M., April 24 at 10:59 AM:

Pah, that doesn’t count - I’m sure A. has at least as many books as I do! ;-)

I’m going to have to monitor my widget a bit more closely, I think. It now seems that *some* user-supplied covers are showing up (i.e. old Dragonlance art) but others are not (i.e. my old-school Narnia editions). I may need to send off a little note to Mr. Spalding, just to see what’s up….

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