27 April, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Do you have an account on LibraryThing? It’s a website for literary nerds where you can catalog all your books, then compare your library to those of your friends and other users, rate books, write reviews, etc. I’ve used LibraryThing to catalog my books, but I rarely use the other features. [See selections from my library floating over there in the left sidebar.] LibraryThing isn’t really designed in a great way. It’s nothing compared to a website like Flickr, for example, but I think it’s a work-in-progress. They should hire me to retool it. I’d make it much better.

Anyway, I was at a conference the past few days and a funny feature on LibraryThing was being discussed. It’s called the UnSuggester. You know how when you’re on Amazon or some such and suggested books pop up, based on what you’ve previously bought or browsed? Well, the UnSuggester is the opposite of that. Enter a book you like in the UnSuggester and it will pop up with a list of books you definitely wouldn’t like. Ha ha.

So I entered one of my favorite novels, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Based on this, the UnSuggester provided a list of books I would not like, with this one being in first place:

The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God

So you see…the UnSuggester does work!

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1. Lingual X Says:

   April 28th, 2008 at 2:11 am

   Yes. I do have a Library Thing account. I love the idea of it. I’m totally enchanted by its promises. I love the idea of being utterly organized and having all of my books in LOC-style perfection. And yet? I can’t seem to make the time to enter them all in. (Well, that and half of my books are in storage because in an NYC apartment, there isn’t enough room for all things books!).

2. Anglofille Says:

   April 28th, 2008 at 10:39 am

   I just set aside one day to enter my books. It became an obsession! Some of my books are in storage back in Boston, so I understand about that. It’s hard to be separated from them.

   I do feel weird about having my library online though. A library seems a very personal thing, in a strange way…

3. Melissa from the Inland Empire, soon to be the Desert Says:

   April 29th, 2008 at 5:52 am

   I have got a Library Thing account, but don’t use it much and am not familiar with the features. I use Goodreads instead, because I can post reviews that way…

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