Book toys

Some fun web sites to indulge your book fancy – obsession? Amazon.com, LibraryThing, and Literature-Map. Amazon will give you suggestions based on books you buy or rate. The more books you rate or buy, the more refined the suggestions become. This recent article discussed just how good those suggestions can be.

LibraryThing does the same, but has far more features and aims less at selling you a book. You basically catalogue your books and then you can sort them by title, your rating, author, tags, etc. It shows you how other members rated a book, makes suggestions for other readings based on all of your books and on each book – even makes ‘unSuggestions’, or opposite books. The site has links to bookswap web sites. According to its Zeitgeist page, LibraryThing has 129,264 members and 9,069,266 books cataloged. The top six books are the Harry Potter series. Wonder how your tastes compare to the hoi polloi? LibraryThing calculates both the mean and median rating of your book (the lower your number the more oddball your tastes).

Literature-Map displays a ‘map’ of authors based on the input of the web site’s users. Type in a name and it will show names of authors in a sort of cloud. The closer together two writers are, the more likely someone will like both of them. The site seems to not be well-monitored. For example, misspelled author names show up actual authors and thus hamper its utility. It's an interesting idea, but it needs more attention.