LibraryThing has become my new favourite internet toy, and it does some really interesting things with books.
First of all, people from all over the world log on and enter books that they own or that they have read into their "library," or personal collection of books. They also use tags in order to help find their books, like Flickr uses tags for photos. You can look at the tag cloud for PRHS's account to see what tags can look like.
After people have entered books into their libraries (and there are now over 8 million books in LibraryThing), LibraryThing can do some analysis and find out things such as:
- how many people own a certain book
- what books you might like based on what you've already got in your library or a book you've already read - this is the Book Suggester feature.
- and what books you might NOT like if you enjoyed a particular book - this is the Book Unsuggester.
I also use LibraryThing to generate those lists of new books that you see on the right side of this page if you scroll down.
What do you think of LibraryThing? Leave a comment and let me know!
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