Slashdot Mirror

If The Matrix were able to simulate chemical reactions, such as we are seeing in abrupt climate change, then there would be no need for humans to be used as batteries. Just because a banker in the necrocene can't accept that his precious capitalism is causing our immanent extinction, in no way should he be allowed to speak for the algorithm that controls his mind. Come to think of it, why can't we have an algorithm, crowd sourced by mathematical truths and overseen by humanity, to run for President?

The Matrix (movie) had it wrong -we're not batteries, we're processors... and maybe by overheating us, it's like overclocking. Read Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons http://www.librarything.com/wo...

Only posting AC because I modded (didn't mod any of this thread, as it didn't, in my opinion, need any. I like to mod+, and there was a lot of good stuff elsewhere in the comments).

After I read this, and got my giggling under control, *TEE-HEEE-HEEE* -oops, I figgered that this deserved a bit of an answer.

The answer is:

I'm here all week, folks. Tell your friends.

or:

Better killfile me, bucko. This ain't gonny stop.

I actually have a fairly good grasp of vocabulary (not perfect, but I'm also not a professional wordsmith), and usually deliberately veer from pedantic snore-generation in order to make reading a bit more, well, FUN.

A lot of folks think that writing should work this way.

I'm not one of them.

The "un-cheap" crack was deliberate. I do that kind of thing fairly often. The original inspiration was, indeed, Orwell's twisted book, but that was a long time ago, and I never really think "Doublespeak" when I do that. It's just a habit (Sadly for you folks, an annoying habit, but there are certainly worse habits).

The reason I thought the story was interesting, was because of the UX/HIG angle. I grew up overseas, and saw more horror by the time I was 11 than a lot of folks see in their entire lives. <shrug /> I survived (although a lot of my playmates didn't). I'm fortunate as hell, and never take life for granted.

For example, I like to play with words. I often deliberately descend into vernacular, use profanities and mispel on porpoise. I often spel wurdz using phoenician tense.

Think of me as Tik Tok, with a haircut and a dental plan.

You can always dedicate yourself to being my mod stalker, enacting your fiendish revenge at every chance. Making my life on /. a living hell.

Or, you could just shrug, shake your head and go on with a life that HAS to have more important things that being a comment-section grammar nazi.

You are hereby encouraged to experience a diurnal period, free from unpleasant experiences and unencumbered by misanthropy.

In udder woids, have a nice day.

Phantom islands aren't really anything new in themselves, but they usuallly date from before satellite imagery: a ship would spot what looked like an island in the distance, nobody on board would bother to go and confirm the existence of terra firma, the island would be named and reported to cartographers later on, and it would keep turning up on charts until someone tried and failed to find it. Some of the better stories that grew up around these islands are in this book: http://www.librarything.com/work/20956/

Too bad your web search didn't lead you to http://librarything.com/

You're going to have to be more specific for the dummies like me. Take the United Nuclear link that has a laser but it's $30 for 30mW. The one this article is about is 1000mW. So on a per-watt basis it's 1/5th the price, which seems the better value really if what you care about is the setting things on fire part.

First of all if your interested in playing with more powerful lasers it's important you understand safety and basic laser theory.

There are plenty of resources out there.

ok, you're clearly retarded, so continuing this debate seems pointless, but i'll make one last, half assed attempt.

http://classiclit.about.com/od/atreegrows/fr/aafpr_treegrows.htm

http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060736262/A_Tree_Grows_in_Brooklyn/index.aspx

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14891.A_Tree_Grows_in_Brooklyn

http://classicreads.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/a-tree-grows-in-brooklyn-schedule/

http://www.teachwithmovies.org/guides/tree-grows-in-brooklyn.html

http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=9780060736262

http://www.librarything.com/work/1475

http://kimbofo.typepad.com/readingmatters/2005/11/a_tree_grows_in.html

And again, Betty Smith is not a 'classic' author, but one of the few books she wrote is a classic book. Can you really not understand that very simple concept, or are you just grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to not have to admit you're wrong?

I don't avoid classics because they're boring. I avoid them because they're pointless. I didn't learn one thing from Slaughterhouse Five. Now, Max Bohm's book Einstein's Theory of Relativity which I read around the same time was fascinating.

When I read, I *want* to learn. That's why I read non-fiction mostly. It's full of facts, you know things that actually happen. Fiction is full of made up stuff, which can be entertaining, but not really informative.

The worst is when people try to interpret fiction. As if there were some other meaning than what's on the page. I don't understand, if the author meant something else, why didn't he write that? If you write something, and two PhDs in the field can't agree on what you meant, that's a failure of communication. Why is it that the people who seem to love the language most can't express themselves unambiguously?

There is a great children's book, "The Chinese word for Horse and other stories" by John Lewis ( http://www.librarything.com/work/1564984 )which shows the structure of some (very few) Chinese characters. (Charles E. Tuttle co. published a small paperback that illustrated some basic Kanji in the same way, but I can't find my copy and I can't remember the name.) Look for a Chinese calligraphy guide that describes the meaning of the radicals as derived from pictures and you will be well on your way to binding the character with the meaning.

It can take as much as 15 years for something to go from short-term memory to long-term memory. (See "Brain Rules" by John Medina http://brainrules.net/ ) A program that helps bridge the gap between initial learning and structured recall is SuperMemo http://www.supermemo.com/ . Ignore the cruddy website and look at the idea behind it and the history.

Flashcards are good, too.

Major practice for writing Chinese is provided in "copy sheets" which can be found at Chinese shops that sell calligraphy supplies and school supplies. They have blocks with faint outlines of Chinese characters and you practice your calligraphy by tracing the character with your brush tip.

You might find "A practical English-Chinese Pronouncing Dictionary" by Janey Chen http://www.amazon.com/Practical-English-Chinese-Pronouncing-Dictionary-Language/dp/0804818770 . This book give an International Phonetics pronunciation (both Mandarin and Cantonese) next to the Chinese words. This is VERY important: One slight change in sound utterance and you've said something different from what you intended!

When learning Chinese, learn some patterns. I suggest "Chiang's Practical Chinese Language Patterns" http://www.amazon.com/Chiangs-Practical-Language-Patterns-Self-Learners/dp/9579727236 , "Practical Chinese Reader" (and the associated workbooks) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887271871/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=9579727236&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=14FXWRGNRW203JQ3QYZC , and an advanced monograph: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED280308&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED280308 .

Another resource, associating the sound with the character by typing it, can be found here: http://vpc-mandarin.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-and-why-to-write-chinese-by-typing.html

My ex-girlfriend and I used to watch a lot of Chinese movies together with the captioning on. The right channel would be Cantonese and the left channel would be Mandarin and the characters would change color as the actors pronounced them. You can find a switch to change the audio channel in most Chinese video stores. This is a good way to associate the sound visually with the language. Cartoons are great for kids and beginning adults because the language is syntactically correct but not too complicated. (Watch out though!; Jackie Chan has lousy Mandarin pronunciation and Zhang Ziyi has lousy Cantonese pronunciation.)

Side note: Japanese Kanji are derived from Chinese characters, b

...if you do want to _read_ something, and to go beyond your knowledge of Java as a language, try Grady Booch's "Object-oriented analysis and design". Not very new, but very useful, and language-independent, too. (Did somebody else mention it? Too lazy to go through all comments...) http://www.librarything.com/work/174920/details

Perhaps they could start by consulting someone like RMS and Linus rather than involving themselves with Microsoft and proprietary software:

"Taxation without web presentation
The Library of Congress recently signed a deal to accept 3 million dollars worth of "technology, services and funding" from Microsoft towards building a new website powered by Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in."

"Most disturbingly, users are locked in, too: anybody using an iPhone, an old version of Windows, any version of Linux, or any other operating system or device not supported by Silverlight will be unable to use the Library of Congress' new website. How is that compatible with the principles of democracy or librarianship? It's taxation without web presentation. And how exactly is that a quantum leap forward? (If the LOC really wanted to make a quantum leap, it would open up its data.)"

* http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2008/02/taxation-without-web-presentation.php

Silverlight lockins - references with links re: Silverlight
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/02/24/silverlight-ooxml-sharepoint-and-more/

LOC / Silverlight news
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=724

Do your own searches for more references:
"library of congress" silverlight
"library of congress" silverlight site:boycottnovell.com
etc.

So, LOC, does this mean you'll redo any portions of your site(s) which feature Silverlight, which is proprietary (troll posters need not bait us by mentioning the useless Moonlight plugin which did not work when major media outlets streamed stuff like the Olympics which required Silverlight, where was Microsoft's big ball of interoperability goodness then? Nowhere! Linux users were scrambling all over posting VLC and other type of workarounds. this is about FREEDOM, not % of population using a certain OS)

You will not get an argument from me if you say that e-books should be cheaper, but...

Speaking as someone who does buy hundreds of books, it does indeed save money over time. Your supposition of saving $1.60 per book is a worst case scenario. I buy lots of books as they are new releases in hardback, and I save $15-20 on those. Many authors give the first couple of books in a series for free on Kindle (the first one's always free) in the hopes that you will purchase more. Those obviously save the full $7.99. This doesn't even count the free public domain books that would still cost you $7 in paperback. Also it's good to note the http://www.baen.com/library/Baen Free Library for loads of free modern SciFi and Fantasy. All Authors and Publishers aren't super greedy.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/KeyMasterOfGozerMy physical library is at 642 books right now, but it hasn't increased much in the past year since I bought my Kindle. The Kindle is way more convenient for me when I travel, and yes, I've saved more money in books than I spent on the device.

My biggest complaint is that I can't share my books with a friend. If the price per book was cheaper, as you say, then it would be easier for them to give a book a try.

Laugh all you want about the CueCat and this Google laptop, but it sounds like a great plan to me:

You, the user, scan in a book's barcode with the CueCat (see http://www2.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/CueCat_barcode_scanning), and Google will look it up in Google Books. If it's already cataloged, then you get access to it in the Google Laptop Browser wherever you are. And if not, a Google SpecOps Team fast-ropes down on your location within minutes to seize the book.

Easy!

My favorite example of a prediction retroactively corrected (albeit more tongue-in-cheek than most) is the Subgenii, who, when the world didn't end in 1998, decided that they'd gotten the date upside down! The correct date, they now proclaim, is 8661. :)

(Actually, they apparently now have end-of-world celebrations every year, just in case, but I remember when the 8661 date was on the front page of the Subgenius website, and that date is still commemorated in the ddate man page as above, and is mentioned in lots of related material.)

Ironically, the page you linked to includes the original Subgenius date with no commentary on either the nature of Slack, er, Bob, er the CoSG, nor any mention of the updated 8661 date.

The difference between geek and nerds as it applies to the internet.

Just like the word hacker has changed from its original meaning, the argument of geek vs. nerd has changed as well. Dork is still the same though. :P

Interesting that this event just came up. I just finished reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet today. For those interested in the history of ARPA and internetworking development (and the people behind these developments - Davies, Kleinrock, Licklider, et. al.), I highly recommend this book.

While firing teachers may be difficult, getting them out of the classroom isn't in NYC.
I first heard about this via "This American Life" on NPR, but this site summarizes it nicely:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/32769

My father was a local teachers' union president for two years. The grievance system can be quite arduous, however many local board members and superintendents were pretty efficient at finding ways to fire teachers or make their job so miserable they quit.

All that said, for us to 'fire' teachers seems to imply that we believe that teachers cannot learn and retrain to become better teachers. Isn't that ironic?

People may be interested in the book The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History on the Spanish flu.

It mentions that these killer strains of flu are an anomaly in a virus that mutates rapidly, and so the general trend is for an outbreak to become less and less deadly as it continues (i.e., subsequent generations revert to the mean). Also, there were multiple strains in play at different times during the whole 1918-1920 crisis.

For some reason this made me think of a scene from The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped, where a member of a village built in a huge chasm is told by an outsider that the wind in the chasm is caused by a glacier at one end and a desert at the other (hot and cold source generating a convection current). The villager had always believed that his god caused the wind to blow to clear smoke out of the village.

The outsider politely smiles and nods, then shrugs to herself and thinks that if god wanted to clear the smoke out of a village, why shouldn't he use a glacier and a desert to do it with?

LibraryThing sells the :Cue:Cat for fifteen bucks to its users to make entering book info easier by scanning the barcode off the books. (Of course, for the really old stuff, you still need to type it all in.)

LibraryThing sells the :Cue:Cat for fifteen bucks to its users to make entering book info easier by scanning the barcode off the books. (Of course, for the really old stuff, you still need to type it all in.)

Librarything will sell you a USB cuecat for $15.

You would be able to find one cheaper. However this is a guaranteed new one, and bets scouring the net for a cheaper one.

The Cuecat is still tremendously useful for the folks at librarything. My wife has one and it has proven a real timesaver given we have about 2000 books or so on our shelves

http://www.librarything.com/cuecat

So perhaps in some instances it has a real and viable purpose?

You can use a Cue Cat for zapping books into LibraryThing, the social book-cataloging site. It's a lot faster than adding everything manually, and it works even if encryption hasn't been disabled.

I bought a USB model for a whopping 10 USD. Then I declawed it by severing the fifth leg from the left on the bottom of the microchip, using a pair of fingernail trimmers (full declawing instructions (pdf), scroll down to page 5). It works nicely in Windows and Linux, no drivers, and I can zap pretty much any barcode and get the actual text read out. It's surprising how often you can zap a barcode into Google and get highly relevant search results.

So, basically, the company's business model may have been crap, but as a cheap barcode scanner their hardware ain't bad. Aside from the dumb encryption part, and the cat shape is silly.

Alas, I didn't win one.

While you're there, sign up for a lifetime membership, or, if you're cheap or broke, a free membership. It's only fair, since my posting this might cause all their bandwidth to be eaten up.

Alas, I didn't win one.

While you're there, sign up for a lifetime membership, or, if you're cheap or broke, a free membership. It's only fair, since my posting this might cause all their bandwidth to be eaten up.

Alas, I didn't win one.

While you're there, sign up for a lifetime membership, or, if you're cheap or broke, a free membership. It's only fair, since my posting this might cause all their bandwidth to be eaten up.

I was practically raised by the DragonLance Saga (definitely Weis and Hickman, though don't avoid Knack's The Legend of Huma), which taught me a lot of my morals. Good guys wear silver armour, bad guys wear black. Honour and chilvary are paramount. Tears that honour life are OK, and we must never give up hope.

I think I cracked my first DragonLance novel around the age of eight or nine. Definitely grade A fantasy for the younglings.

As others have mentioned, McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern novels are all great, and Mercedes Lackey has a wide range of novels (The Free Bards is a good one for younger readers). I also recommend my wife's favourite, Diana Wynne Jones and the various Chrestomanci books. She read them as a child and we still read them. Diane Duane's Support Your Local Wizard is another great young adult fantasy novel.

Rather than go on, feel free to check out the books in our library tagged as young adult and fantasy.

2 places that I use: Library Thing http://www.librarything.com/ and Mobile Read http://www.mobileread.com/

I highly recommend Teach Yourself Electronics by Malcolm Plant. I have a Master's degree in electrical engineering and I started with hobby electronics before I learned to ride a bike, and this book is sitting on my desk as I type. ;)

Try LibraryThing http://www.librarything.com/

There's more to cataloging books than just finding them. We've probably got only a couple thousand, but my wife catalogs them using LibraryThing and also stores them in a local file. To my knowledge, we've never used either to find a book in our house, but these things give us:

• An easy way when we're out to see if we already own a copy of a book. LibraryThing has a mobile interface that makes checking with a cell phone easy.
• A document for the insurance man if we ever get hit by a fire or other disaster (you do offsite backups regularly, right?).
• An easy way of tagging books when they get packed for moves so that the library can be restored efficiently at the other end.

I agree that you don't need a computer to find a book in a collection of less than 10,000 books. If you can't organize those physically well enough to find them without a computer, a computer is just going to make it harder. Sorting by fiction/non-fiction and then by author is sufficient for us (with a special computer books section) to find anything pretty quickly. But it's pretty difficult to remember if you already have book sixty-two in the "Accordion of Fate" series or whether you have the third or fourth edition of O'Reilly's "Programming $ELITIST_LANGUAGE_OF_THE_MONTH" when you're out and about. And if you lose your whole collection, the chances of remembering the whole thing are virtually nil unless you have perfect photographic memory, in which case, why do you need to keep books around in the first place? :-)

And the flamebait mod for the parent post was unfair and I hope it's M2ed as such.

That's what I was thinking. Sounds a lot like what http://www.librarything.com/ already does. Of course, they already have a big head start

I joined LibraryThing recently, and it was interesting to see that they've included the option to link to your profile on many other social network sites - Myspace, LJ, Blogger ... and Slashdot. I set up a squidoo as well, and they pull out the RSS for my blog and display summaries.

I guess all this has a logical conclusion, where someone sets up a meta-site that pulls together all your online profiles into one 'ME' page. When they do that, it'll be quite something. Imagine all your Myspace friends without the Myspace baggage ...

Try this:
http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/920
For some reason the bible doesn't feature :P

Librarything is wonderful. The Unsuggester is cool in a geeky way, but way down on the list of impressive features. There's some more info about how the Suggester and Unsuggester work in this post on the LibraryThing Blog.

A lot of the really good features only become apparent once you've created an account (best online account creation ever) and added some books. You can add 200 for free, and adding them is easy - go on, give it a try. For a start, you can get suggestions that take your entire library into account.

They're also having a very active dialogue with people in the library science field, and employ an actual real-life librarian. ;)

I was not paid to say any of this! I'm just a very satisfied paid up member of the site since shortly after it appeared.

UnSuggestions for The red badge of courage by Stephen Crane produces an odd list as well: Vampire books, Lisp programing, shopping, and knitting. Seems pretty wierd.

Item 7 was a surprise:

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/1426655

how about this ...
it brings up a ton of Terry Pratchett's books.
(not good omens though)

A colleague points out that current sport among search mavens is to find the "the
perfectly evil book which causes the Unsuggester to generate a great library. The best try so far was "Who Moved My Cheese? For Kids", but not enough people own it."

The very fact that there is a WMMC for kids gives me greater despair then knowing GWB will be President for two more years.

Although the WMMC regular ed. unsuggestions are pretty good, good enough to keep my book club busy for a few years:

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/12799

Actually, entering "Wuthering Heights"--a book I truly loathed when I was forced to read it in 12th grade--got me an interesting mix of christian-related reading material and a very large number of books on Lisp, Java, AI, web programming, and compilers. So apparently people who hated Wuthering Heights are either computer science majors or hard-core christians. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

It doesn't work. I have proof

I really would be interested to know how this site works!

Ask and ye shall receive!

http://www.librarything.com/blog/2006/11/booksugge ster-and-unsuggester.php

Easy, put in a Bible-related book and receive some great reads! Three of which I've already read. I really would be interested to know how this site works!

Monkeyboi :D

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/3697

Every single unrecommendation for Hitchhiker's guide is a religious/Christian themed book...
I don't know how to interpret that, any ideas?

1. New Testament Commentary: Exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians (New Testament Commentary) by Simon J. Kistemaker (expected 21.9, found 0; unsuggestions)
2. The five points of Calvinism : defined, defended, documented by David N. Steele (expected 19.9, found 0; unsuggestions)
3. Ashamed of the gospel : when the Church becomes like the world by John MacArthur (expected 19.3, found 0; unsuggestions)
4. An introduction to the New Testament by D. A. Carson (expected 26.8, found 1; unsuggestions)
5. Charismatic chaos by John MacArthur (expected 17.2, found 0; unsuggestions)
6. The master plan of evangelism by Robert Emerson Coleman (expected 23.7, found 1; unsuggestions)
7. Calvin's Commentaries (22 Volumes) by John Calvin (expected 22.5, found 1; unsuggestions)
8. Just like Jesus by Max Lucado (expected 20.7, found 1; unsuggestions)
9. The dangerous duty of delight by John Piper (expected 19.7, found 1; unsuggestions)
10. A Godward life : savoring the supremacy of God in all life by John Piper (expected 19.5, found 1; unsuggestions)
11. More ready than you realize : evangelism as dance in the postmodern matrix by Brian D. McLaren (expected 18.8, found 1; unsuggestions)
12. Counted righteous in Christ : should we abandon the imputation of Christ's righteousness? by John Piper (expected 18.6, found 1; unsuggestions)
13. Becoming a contagious Christian by Bill Hybels (expected 18.4, found 1; unsuggestions)
14. Resident aliens : life in the Christian colony by Stanley Hauerwas (expected 18.2, found 1; unsuggestions)
15. The First Epistle to the Corinthians by Gordon D. Fee (expected 17.6, found 1; unsuggestions)
16. And the angels were silent by Max Lucado (expected 17.4, found 1; unsuggestions)
17. He chose the nails : what God did to win your heart by Max Lucado (expected 17.2, found 1; unsuggestions)
18. Paul in fresh perspective by N. T. Wright (expected 17.2, found 1; unsuggestions)
19. New Testament history by F. F. Bruce (expected 16.8, found 1; unsuggestions)
20. Stepping heavenward by Elizabeth Prentiss (expected 16.6, found 1; unsuggestions)
21. Disciplines of a godly man by R. Kent Hughes (expected 16.6, found 1; unsuggestions)
22. The art of innovation : lessons in creativity from IDEO, America's leading design firm by Tom Kelley (expected 16.2, found 1; unsuggestions)
23. Handbook of denominations in the United States by Frank Spencer Mead (expected 16.2, found 1; unsuggestions)
24. New Testament introduction by Donald Guthrie (expected 16.2, found 1; unsuggestions)
25. Rediscovering expository preaching by John MacArthur (expected 16, found 1; unsuggestions)
26. Shepherding a child's heart [sound recording] : audio book by Tedd Tripp (expected 26.5, found 2; unsuggestions)
27. Decision making & the will of God : a Biblical alternative to the traditional view by Garry Friesen (expected 15.8, found 1; unsuggestions)
28. An unstoppable force : daring to become the church God had in mind by Erwin Raphael McManus (expected 15.8, found 1; unsuggestions)
29. Trusting God by Jerry Bridges (expected 15.6, found 1; unsuggestions)
30. The supremacy of God in preaching by John Piper (expected 24.3, found 2; unsuggestions)
31. Seeing and s

You seem to have completely missed the point. Tags aren't an alternative to text searches. They're an alternative to conventional categorization. Meta tag overloading isn't really a problem in most tag system implementations, and by the success of del.icio.us, it seems to be a very effective organizational system for web content. You can still do a text search on the collection, but tags give a more intuitive way of grouping related articles together using the benefits of folksonomy, which increase with the the size of the userbase. So Slashdot's implementation of tags seems to be very appropriate.

I stumbled across the above link while exploring LibraryThing as part of the research I've been conducting for a network library application I'm developing. I was looking for a way to categorize/catalog the ebooks in a virtual library and found conventional catagorization techniques to be inappropriate for a virtual collection. Genre hierarchies seemed inadequate for a collection not limited by physical restrictions. Most books tend to belong in multiple categories, and many subcategories have more than one obvious parent category. Tags seemed to be the perfect solution to the problem as it did not rely on a specific view of how things should be categorized and used a more web-like structure rather than the rigid hierarchical structure of conventional classification systems. This is also more in line with the web's overall structure where all the nodes are interconnected by hyperlinks in a folksonomic organization.

I would recommend reading that article and doing some more research on folksonomy before you dismiss the practical benefits of tagging as opposed to alternative organization methods.

LibraryThing is trying to do something similar to what you describe with its "work" system. Basically all different publications of a particular title are linked to one "work", which allows for recommendations and reviews to be shared among different owners of the same title (even if they own copies by different publishers, dates, etc.). The database is pretty small so far (only a few million books) but it's a pretty nifty concept and should only be more useful as more people add their books.

LibraryThing is pretty cool. It's a member-built database, but it links back to Amazon to get a lot of the details.

http://www.oclcpica.org/
http://books.google.com/
http://www.librarything.com/
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/

Were you looking for something specific?

From LT's FAQ:

"LibraryThing uses Amazon and libraries that provide open access to their collections with the Z39.50 protocol. The protocol is used by a variety of desktop programs, notably bibliographic software like EndNote. LibraryThing appears to be the first mainstream web use."

http://www.oclcpica.org/
http://books.google.com/
http://www.librarything.com/
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/

Were you looking for something specific?

From LT's FAQ:

"LibraryThing uses Amazon and libraries that provide open access to their collections with the Z39.50 protocol. The protocol is used by a variety of desktop programs, notably bibliographic software like EndNote. LibraryThing appears to be the first mainstream web use."

Another vote for Librarything, it rules =)

I only have a small collection (450 ish) and I was able to catalogue my books really easily. I don't have a barcode scanner, so manually noted down all of the isbns into a text file using my pda. Imported said text file into library thing, it queued them up and pulled out all of the data from amazon. As a brit I can set it to use amazon.co.uk and uk libraries for data. I have a few foreign books too, that's no problem, I tell it which country to use and away it goes :)

The social data aspect of LT is brilliant, I've spent ages browsing through other people's libraries, mostly those that show a high number of matches to books in my library. It's a very good way of getting a feel for what kind of books and titles I might enjoy.

The other thing I love is tagging, I never really caught onto the whole 'tag everything' thing with photos and blog stuff, but it's brilliantly suited to cataloguing. I can keep track of all of my signed stuff, stuff I've lent out, stuff that is in different places etc...

Overall it's something that only has the potential to get better and better as the creator adds new features improvements and extras.

In short, I love Librarything =) http://www.librarything.com/profile/chimera252/