My One True Love...and Monday Musing!

Wow, these weeks go by so fact, don't they. So, another Monday, another musing, from Just One More Page,

Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about online book sites…

Do you have an account with an online book database site (LibraryThing, Shelfari, GoodReads etc)? If so, do you have a preference? Do you use it for - your own record keeping? finding new books to read? social networking?

Well, my dear readers, if you check out my blog on a regular basis...like every week....you will know the answer to that one, since every Tuesday I post on Tuesday Thinger, a meme about...Library Thing.

I will not bore you with another post about my beloved Library Thing. But I do love it. Because...now I don't want to start a fight here...but of the various database sites out there, Library Thing is without question the best. Oh, I can hear the mumblings from a few of you. Certainly you are free to disagree. But folks...how can I say this ...if you do not agree, you are just wrong. lol... ;-)

I have told the story of how I started on Library Thing. I bought a copy of a book, only to come home and find I had the exact same edition of the same book sitting on my shelf. It seemed I needed to get a hold on my books, find some way to tract what I owned and what I read, so I Googled and the rest is history.

Now, I did check out some other sites. Shelfari was too slick for me...sort of like LT Lite. GoodReads..well, I liked that enough to sign up and try it, but when I started using them both, Library Thing won my mind and heart.
To me the format is just cleaner and more flexible to how I want to use the site. And that, I find, is ultimately the difference. Library Thing is about how I want to use it. And I love that the site, while having almost 800,000 members and with "Books cataloged, 41,847,555" according to the "Zeitgeist Overview" page, feels small.
The guy that started it, who owns the majority, Tim Spalding, is always around, posting in various threads, answering questions, trying to determine what changes people want. The people that run the site are known and an active part of the site, and I swear, every time I go there, there is some new, nice little addition to make it just a little better. I love all the stats, I love the clean look, I love all the available data, the recommendations, similarities to others libraries...well, I could go on and on. I love all the numbers and stats and interconnectedness of it all.

Needless to say, I have stopped updating my GoodReads account. I may just delete the whole account, if I could figure out how, just to tidy up lose ends.
Library Thing is all I need.

Primarily, I use it for my own record keeping. It is amazing..or bizarre...or sad...how many times it has saved me from buying a book I already have or already read. Library Thing is so neat and tidy. So unlike my Real Life books. It gives me an organization I will never have in real life.

Book recommendations. Well, if I needed any, Library Thing wold certainly be happy to help me in that regard. All those stats again, the whole "people that own this book also like this book" thing, plus the ability to look at other similar libraries or search by tags...well, the ways of finding recommendations on LT are many. But, as I have also discussed her, I am not really in need of any more books at the moment. Or for several years.

Do I use it as a social networking site? No, not really. I read some of the threads in groups there, I post on occasion but it has never really grabbed my interest a great deal. Partly that whole "so little time" thing too.

But, since LT introduced me to the whole idea of ARCs, and in fact to the whole world of book blogs, it did introduce me to you all, my dear readers. That's social enough for me!