I seriously considered demanding an official exemption from this Thing. A site where you can spend your (constantly shrinking) non-working hours cataloguing books? You might as well ask Tesco checkout staff to scan in the barcodes of their kitchen contents every night. So I admit this may have influenced my opinion of LibraryThing. But my initial impression was that it wasn't great.
It was slow: when I searched, the "loading" bar kept appearing as if groaning under the effort, then there were further strained pauses while it sorted the results.
It didn't have catalogue records for the books I own. It's probably workable if you only own books published after about 1980. I did like the idea of the book covers but I couldn't find any for books that I own. Some people include DVDs, which is confusing. There are subject groups that interest me but I don't see myself discussing ancient history with someone called bookmonk or hyppo. I tried looking for records for books in the UL tower, with some idea that we could use the dustjacket images in publicity for the Tower Project, but still no records.
However, I had the idea of looking for books I might want to read or own and I have to say it was a lot more rewarding. There were far more records for modern books, the majority of them with dustjacket images. It's a visually satisfying way of keeping a "wishlist" online. I put together a possible reading list of books by Jon Stallworthy, who dazzled me by quoting three times from Horace in as many minutes at Tuesday's Sassoon exhibition opening and generally looking like an Oxford don, probably played by John Gielgud.
Then I noticed the Currently reading option and thought that might be something I'd like to talk about. So I've put my current reading there and I'll see what happens. Will I be contacted by other Lindsey Davis fans?
