Brain Assassin

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.

The third site I vis­ited was Reader². To be hon­est, I didn’t really reg­is­ter there. Skim­ming over the first page pretty soon made it clear that this site spe­cial­izes in the social aspect of col­lect­ing books. Yes, you can cre­ate a list of books and put it online but I wanna do more. Plus, a lit­tle research with google showed that even though the site sup­ports a few lan­guages it doesn’t find lots of books so you have to enter them man­u­ally. Nav­i­ga­tion is pretty con­fus­ing too, so I didn’t stay all that long.

The next online book­shelf I got to know is Shel­fari. It fea­tures a nice design and it has some tools to show your col­lec­tion on your blog. Library­Thing also offers these wid­gets but they’re not quite what I was look­ing for. Ger­man books don’t work all that well but that’s OK, I only want to cat­a­log my Eng­lish books. Shel­fari is also the first ser­vice that offers the option to delete your account. Accord­ing to the lat­est blog entry Shel­fari recently inte­grated with Amazon’s search algo­rithms. Sat­is­fied as I was I chose to go with this bookshelf.

I did found some other ser­vices, though. There’s All Con­sum­ing which looks a bit funky and seems to con­cen­trate on the social aspect of con­sum­ing in gen­eral rather than con­sum­ing books. Goodreads falls into the same cat­e­gory but focuses on giv­ing rec­om­men­da­tions. Last but not least, Revish is also cen­tered on the social aspect of read­ing. You can review and talk about books while main­tain­ing and shar­ing your read­ing lists.