cataloging

The Wall Street Journal writes about a new social networking site called LibraryThing.com — for people to create catalogs of their books. Similar to software like Booxter or Delicious Library, you record all of your books in a cataloging data set. But in this case the database is stored online, and is shared with other users.
The software is free for up to 200 books (haaa!) and $10 for a year or $25 for life. I haven’t investigated to see how data can be exported from the program after being entered, but I would think that would be a must-have feature.
I’m currently using Booxter to catalog my books. Sort of. Everything’s in a uproar now. But I chose it because it’s cheap and it exports the data to a tab-delimited file that I can use to create a database. After using it awhile, I sort of changed my mind and wished I’d shelled out a bit more for the Delicious Library software, because it also catalogs DVDs and video games, which I now have libraries of as well.
But LibraryThing.com is interesting for the social networking component — you can tag your books like Flickr… and you can see what other people have bookmarked, too. I’m going to poke around in it a bit further.