Tuesday Thingers...

Marie at The Boston Biblipohile hosts Tuesday Thingers. Today's Tuesday Thingers question is: Why LT? Why did you choose to open and maintain an LT account? Do you/did you use other online cataloging/social networking sites, like GoodReads or Shelfari? Do you use more than one? Are they different or do they serve different purposes?

This dovetails nicely with last week's questions about our LT catalogue. I joined Librarything in March of 2007. I don't remember how I came across the site but I knew from the short tour I took that it was something that would make an impact in my life. I choose to open an LT account to use it as a reading journal more than anything else. After touring last week's answers it appears that I'm in the minority in this sense. Most who answered last week are purists and only catalogue the books they own. If that was the case for me I wouldn't have an LT account. I don't have a physical library in my house. I don't keep my books as I rarely re-read. I choose to either pass them along or return them to library.

I was keeping an excel spreadsheet to track what I'd read. I'd been doing it for about 5+ years. It was simply a way to keep me from buying books that I'd already read. I wasn't tracking any other information. By the time I joined LT that spreadsheet was up to about 10 pages and I had to print an updated copy every time I'd go book shopping ~ not very convenient. Now I can check my library, when browsing a brick & mortar bookstore, using my cell phone.

I love LT. Not only do I catalogue the books I've read it's inspired me to start a reading blog, join the ER group, track reading stats (books read each month, # of pages per month, et cetera) and probably other things I can't think of right now.

I have not used another cataloguing site. I was a member for a very short time of social networking site but elected to leave as it's too much work and was taking away from other areas of my life, introvert traits making themselves known again. I've heard of the other sites such as Shelfair and Goodreads but haven't taken the time to investigate them. I'm not really into networking on a large scale on the Internet.