Social Network for Book Lovers

When I visit someone’s home, I can’t help but checkout the books on their shelves. Often, I find that with very good friends, we have many books and interests in common. But what is the most interesting is when I visit the home of someone that I get on pretty well with and like a lot but there’s just something that I can’t put my finger on - for some reason, we do not connect at a very deep level and I just have a sense that we’ll never be the best of friends. When I visit their home, it all becomes clear - they do not have a single book in their home, apart from maybe a few cookery books or travel guides. In my house, every single room, including the hallway is full of books - and I’ve just given a whole pile to Oxfam to make space for new books.

It’s not that I talk about books and writing very much with my friends, even with those who do have a lot of books nor is it that I am only interested in making friends with people who like books. I think it’s just the fact that I read a lot and with the friends who also enjoy reading, we have a connection that is about exploring ideas, analysis and arguments that books can give you. Books also offer a perspective on time, space and people in that they tell you about history, landscape, context, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics and just plain old human stories. People who don’t read miss out on that opportunity to travel beyond the immediate extent of their own experience and so I guess when we come together, we can laugh and enjoy each other’s company and give emotional support as friends would do - but we just do not have an overlapping breadth of interest.

Since I’ve been exploring ebooks and audio books in my Going Shelfless experiment, I have wondered what the future holds for us readers when we can no longer explore the full extent of each other’s libraries because everything is a digital file on a laptop or iPod or ebook reader. Will an aspect of friendship and social connection be lost?

Many book lovers have probably discovered this social network already but I’ve only just come across it. LibraryThing enables you to put a list of your books online - books you own, books you are currently reading, books you’d like to read etc - to show to the world and also to see who else has the same reading taste as you.

You sign up for a free account (which allows you to list up to 200 books - after that, you need to pay for an annual or a lifetime account at pretty cheap rates) and you can then list your books by finding them on various online bookstores which have been intergrated with LibraryThing - clicking on the book link automatically inserts them in your library. There’s a Talk forum where you can discuss a particular book. There are also different book Groups you can join sorted by genre eg there’s a Science Fiction group and a Crime, Thriller and Mystery group.

In true social media fashion, you can also put a widget on your blog that shows random books from your library. You can see mine below:

You can see my full library (or at least the books I’ve gotten round to listing) at: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/yangmayooi

You can also add other LibaryThing members as Friends, as you might add Friends on Facebook or MySpace. One way to make friends is that you can see how many other people have a book that you have in their library - you can discover who they are if they have a public profile by drilling down through the numbers to specific profiles, and you can invite them to be your friend that way. Or you can search for your friends using the Search function.

I don’t have the time to catalogue ALL the books I own but I may use it to log current books as they have a short cut button you can put on your browser bar to add books to your library as you purchase them from Amazon and I usually buy my books from there anyway.

I wonder if members of LibraryThing list all the books they own and have ever read or is there the temptation to omit the more soically unacceptable ones - the low brow bodice-ripper, say, or the more desperate sounding self-help books that you might hide behind another layer of more worthy titles or even keep under your bed….

If you’re a member of LibraryThing, add me as a Friend. Also, please share your experience of this network and how it may have added to your enjoyment of books and reading. And whether you “censor” your list for public consumption…!

ebk