Dur­ing the recent work on my blog I thought that I could come up with some kind of library sec­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, that was eas­ier said than done. I tried to come up with a solu­tion to dis­play all the books I own – well, at least the Eng­lish ones – but I couldn’t fig­ure out how to make it user friendly and well arranged. So, I was brows­ing the inter­net look­ing for inspi­ra­tion when I stum­bled over an online book­shelf. Where there’s one, there are usu­ally more. A quick search ended with a few pos­si­ble solutions.

The first online book­shelf I found is called Library­Thing. I imme­di­ately signed up and tried a few things. Unfor­tu­nately, I dis­cov­ered dur­ing the reg­is­tra­tion process that you can only add up to 200 books for free. If you want more books, you have to pay $10  a year or $25 once. I gladly pay for ser­vices ren­dered but I don’t like to pay for some­thing that doesn’t suit my needs. I have to say, though, that Library­Thing is easy to use, offers lots of lan­guages and scan­ner sup­port. Yeah, well … I decided to do a lit­tle more research.

GuruLib is the next site I dis­cov­ered. After sign­ing up I found that this one offer a quite exten­sive data­base. It’s very user friendly too but it looks quite dull. Inter­est­ingly enough, GuruLib isn’s specif­i­cally for books. One can also use it to man­age movies, music, games and soft­ware. It’s nice enough and it’s free but it looks way too spar­tan to me. So, off I was to check out the next one.

Read more…