Mr. Bigglesworth

I registered today on LibraryThing and added 5 books from my collection at home. I hope to eventually expand the number of books I have on LibraryThing to include everything I own but that is a summer project which I will work at slowly and leisurely. Yes, LibraryThing is fun and extremely easy to use. I decided to add three books I own by don Miguel Ruiz (including "The Four Agreements"). I also added "Brand Name Bullies: the Quest to Own and Control Culture", and "The Inferno of Dante" (a bilingual edition that was first published in 1994, a brilliant Italian-to-English translation by Harold Pinsky).

LibraryThing has many features that I am still exploring. I discovered a feature called "ottobib" that automatically displays your book's bibliographic citation information in any one of the major formats (i.e. MLA, Turabian). I added all my books by their ISBN, to be sure I was extracting information for the exact edition(s) I own. LibraryThing searches in Amazon or Library of Congress (you can select either). Once your title is displayed on the screen, you have the option of adding tags to describe your book. The complete descriptions are as thorough and detailed as you would find in any first rate library catalogue anywhere.

You can discover how many other people own your book (535 people own "The Four Agreements" and 3044 people own my edition of "The Inferno"). Discussions abound on this site, so it is a sociable book lover's paradise. Stuck for a new book to read? Refer to LibraryThing's "recommendations machine" to find similar books to what you like (based on what you have in your catalogue). There is also an "unsuggester", should you be curious to discover what the antithetical equivalent of your book is!

And what does Mr. Bigglesworth have to do with LibraryThing? I had my mind on cats, and needed to think of a username, so... viola.

Tam