jalon q. zimmerman

I hold books as sacred, and have walls full of them. There is a never-ending pile of books by the bed. I’m not a book snob though, I read a large variety of genres and topics. I can only go to the used bookstore because I read through them too fast. I sometimes bring home duplicate copies of books since I cannot keep track of them anymore.

I have long wanted to get my library online in some form. I have explored a variety of options, none of which fit. A few days ago I saw that Amazon purchased AbeBooks and now Shelfari. This piqued my interest since Shelfari is an obvious tie-in with the Kindle. So, I decided to take some time to try to nail things down.

Delicious Library 2 just came out, it’s iSight camera barcode scanner works well. It has good web upload and export features, even accommodating an iPod or iPhone. It can manage many kinds of things besides books like music, electronics, etc. That sounds good for the insurance records I have been worrying about.

I also discovered the online library managers Shelfari and LibraryThing, and to a lesser extent the other 38 or so competitors. Shelfari looked good on the surface and seemed to be very user friendly. LibraryThing seemed kind of archaic and stodgy.

I gathered an armload of books, created an account on Shelfari and started adding them. Things went really easy, and with 6 books in my library I set about trying to integrate Shelfari with my website.

I found a convoluted widget management system based on Flash and obfuscated Javascript. CSS stylesheets are hidden and options are extremely limited. A single reference to managing the widget’s CSS (but no stylesheet) and outdated documentation make things worse. The widgets are heavy on the eye-candy, light on functionality, with a maximum exposure of the Shelfari brand. It took an hour with a CSS inspector to implement a clean, non-branded sidebar widget in Wordpress.

I googled about the differences between Shelfari and LibraryThing. Shelfari owns all user-submitted content while LibraryThing is open.

I decided to give LibraryThing a try. Upon creating an account there, I was presented with too much content and too many options. This is not a site for the faint-hearted. I added some books and was impressed at how much more powerful the interface was. In Shelfari, I kept losing the “add a book” page when I checked for a different edition. LibraryThing never lost the “add a book” context. +1 for LibraryThing.

I then dug out some less popular one books to really put these sites through their paces. A food guide from Taipei in Taiwanese with only an ISBN number recognizable, a 1964 copy of “Waves and Beaches”, a 1958 copy of “The Ghost of Follonsbee’s Folly” should present a challenge.

Shelfari found all of the modern books, but had trouble with the older ones. It listed multiple and inaccurate listings with almost no details. It was impossible to select the correct edition from all of the duplicates.

LibraryThing looked up the Library of Congress card numbers, let me choose the correct edition, and let me choose from user-contributed covers! The only book that both sites couldn’t locate was the food guide from Taipei. anobii had it listed.

Shelfari is free, has ads, is heavy on the eye-candy and light on the functionality. Shelfari owns all content you put into the system. LibraryThing is free up to 200 books, is $25 for life, has no ads, a less pretty interface and is powerful. LibraryThing uses the “Common Knowledge License”.

The Shelfari target market is a MySpace profile or hosted blog, rather than someone with their own website.

LibraryThing would benefit by turning off or trimming back many of the initial displays on a user’s default page. It’s overwhelming.

In terms of social interaction, LibraryThing has a mapping feature to find local members and group interaction. Shelfari is “social linking” oriented, but members do not interact as fully as on LibraryThing.

So, I will be researching LibraryThing more and working on integrating it with my website. I’m not sure about Delicious Library 2, since it is missing the social and book recommendation aspect of the online sites.