My New Thing

...is to play Librarian. But not in that way ok.

I've been a book freak all my life. I have a bad habit of buying books even if I don't have time to read them yet. (I say in defense of all the expenses that I'm buying books not just for myself but also for my children. But heck who am I kidding.) So I've accumulated some number of books which I really haven't gotten around to cataloguing. I've been planning to do so for the longest time but for some reason the very act itself of typing book names, authors, categories, etc., in rows and rows of boring MS Excel spreadsheets or MS Access databases does not appeal to me enough for me to allot time to do it.

Which is why I love my the new thing. www.librarything.com. Not only does it do the obvious (which is, er... to catalogue your books), it adds fancy stuff as well, e.g. book covers, tags, recommendations, who else has got the books in your library, provide html code for a blog widget, the output for my library you can see in the sidebar, and as below...





Two ways to view your library: as a list, and as a compilation of covers. The catch is that it's free for only 200 books. Beyond that you have to pay US10 for one year or US25 for a lifetime membership.

I don't think my new thing has the same "newness" for everyone else. Due to my blogging hiatus of the previous year I think I am the last person on blogging earth to have discovered it. Woe to me who discovered this widget later than everyone else... a widget about books at that. Oh the shame! The disgrace! Well, at least I've caught on. Letter bait nun thever (thever?).