Thing #11: It's All about the Merchandising

LibraryThing is a tool for cataloging the user's library (lots of data entry here), for connecting with people who share the same taste in books, and for generating hype about books. While the user is supposed to be able to add the book by entering its title or author, it only works if you enter the book's ISBN #. Once entered, a nice little picture of the book jacket and a ranking of the # of people who have added or reviewed the book appear. You can add tags, reviews, etc., and search for people and libraries who share your taste in books. There are a lot of little fun features, but my favorite is the "widget" montage of covers of "Random Books in My Library." Very pretty. It's also an easy way to get small color copies of book covers for displays. I used to use Amazon for this, but they blocked the feature a few years ago, supposedly for copyright reasons.

My first question was: should I add the books I've read, the books I own, or the books I've read and own? Or I could draw a Venn diagram of where the "owned" and "read" books intersect. Oh, Hell. I finally just decided to add books I read and liked relatively recently. First problem: only books that are in print and on sale on Amazon will appear. If you click on the book cover, you will be sent to the Amazon page where you can purchase it. No surprise here. The site's owner, Tim Spalding, openly gloats in two separate places that he hopes to make a ton of money from the site, including an aside to Amazon Associates. Apparently he gets 5% of each sale directed to Amazon from LibraryThing. Pretty cool idea to make a buck, especially as a lot of people seem to love it. In fact, there is a huge "Buzz" page of accolades. I especially liked one comment that LibraryThing is "both entrancing and evil." According to the site's owner, "If the buzz page doesn't convince you, you cannot be convinced. Go away."

In short, this site is cute and fun and a clever idea for those with a lot of time on their hands, especially for Spalding, the wannabe-millionaire who developed it. For those in the book biz, it's a great marketing analysis, merchandising, and advertising tool. Not only is web 2.0 changing the way we interact with one another, it's creating whole new business models. This guy may just be onto something here.