News – Why I am Light on Book Reviews This Week

So I am a bit light on book reviews this week as well as books read for January overall but there is a reason for this…and, of course, it is book related.

I decided to catalog all my books on LibraryThing.com. Not a small undertaking when you consider there are probably over a thousand books in our house. When you add in my wishlist (at least 200 books) and all the books I’ve reviewed in the last three years (500+ books) it gets colossal.

I have found out a rather cool thing about LibraryThing though; they allow you to import .txt (or other files) of ISBNs. They will look up the ISBN from the file and add the book to your shelf for you. Even cooler on my Nexus One Android Phone I have a “read barcode” app that reads barcodes and puts it into a text file that you can then upload to LibraryThing. So for most of the books importing them is as easy as scanning barcodes and uploading the file. Unfortunately books older than 1990 seem to use a UPC code for the barcode instead of the ISBN sooo…those have to be entered by hand. The best part is that it is all basically free. If you go over 200 books you have to pay a $25 lifetime membership fee, or you can opt for a $10 yearly fee.

I am really, really impressed with LibraryThing…it has so much flexibility and it is really really well thought out. You can have multiple collections and everything. So, I have my books from Amazon Vine to review on one “shelf”, my books from authors on another “shelf”, books I have read on another, books that I own on one, and books that I read but no longer own on another. Then my son’s books are in a different collection…etc. Of course books can be in multiple collections so that is cool. They also allow mass tagging and mass book collection IDing. I am sure there is more functionality than I even know, but so far I am impressed.

Sooo…that is mainly what I am doing this week. It is seriously cutting into my reading time. This may be all old news to some people but it is my first time using something beside paperbackswap.com to organize my books and I am loving it. I am driving my husband a little crazy as I empty bookshelves and scan them in, but it is all worth it 🙂 I will post my LibraryThing.com ID on here when I am all done so you can all snope and see what books I have laying around the house.

Another side note. I recently was turned on to bookdepository.com. They have some serious deals on books with free shipping. They are in England so it takes a bit to get the books (you know customs and all) but there are sweet deals on there. Last month I bought “Kitty’s House of Horrors” by Carrie Vaughn for $3.98. This week I got “Steamed: A Steampunk Romance” by Katie MacAlister for $3.98. You can’t get those books any cheaper used; even if you were to find unreleased books at half price books! So I thought I would share the wealth 🙂

Hope you all have a good week! I promise my usual 4-5 book reviews next week…