A Thing About Books and Libraries

You can learn something about a person by the books they read. Even the books we buy but never get around to finishing, tell others quite a lot about our interests. And so, in these days of global, online friendships and conversation, taking a glimpse at someone's library gives an insight into that person that we could not otherwise glean.

Recently, I ran across another form of online community that's based on the books that people keep in their libraries. This service allows you to set up an account (free for the first 200 books in your library) and enter your books. As you enter your books (by title, author or ISBN), the service searches amazon.com's inventory as well as the catalogs of the Library of Congress and several metropolitan libraries for matching information and even library call numbers. It also matches you up with other members by commonly owned books, as well as the tags (categorizes) that you may assign to them. That service is called Library Thing.

Library Thing Totals (as of now)

Books cataloged 3,170,752
Total users 44,835 (since August 29, 2005)
Unique works 876,840
Total tags 4,650,035
Total reviews 39,693
Total ratings 439,182
User-contributed covers 85,852

The largest single library is just over 9,000 books. Probably 9 times what I have, and 100 times as many as I will ever bother to list. As a non-fiction reader, I feel a bit out of place, even in this oasis for Internet geeks. I'm not even typical here. The top titles and authors read by the current participants, are popular fiction and science-fiction. The most shared book that I have listed is also owned by 907 others: Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. The next most popular authors, in those books that I've listed so far, are: Karen Armstrong, Elaine Pagels and Brian McLaren, all owned by less than 200 hundred others (less than half of 1%). Only a couple of people there share my interest in social economists Peter Drucker or John Micklethwait. Nobody's else has yet listed Philosopher Barry Allen's excellent book, Knowledge and Civilization. I'd really be out of place if I listed all my computer and technology books, which is mostly what I've read for the past 25 years.

Anyway, just in case you're interested, you can see the titles that I've listed so far, here. Here's my Amazon wish list. If you have a library at Library Thing, or anywhere else, let us know in the comments. Also, what do you think books tell us about their readers? What can we learn by looking at someone's personal library?

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