Subclassed

16 August 2008

Tag your f***ing books!

After a few days wandering around "literary" social-networking sites, I'm feeling a bit frustrated by how people interpret their participation in a very solipsistic way. Listing your own books is half the fun, I get it, but certainly the other half is hooking up with other like-minded bookworm geeks; you should put in a little effort to make your shelf accessible to them. Why then few can be bothered to tag their books? Without tags, I'm left to dig through hundreds of items I don't care about, whereas even a little classification (like separating novels and non-fiction, or fantasy and contemporary) would go a long way to help me define that you like the same sort of harrypotterish works I (might or might not) enjoy.

So please, if you are serious about this sort of sites, try to tag your books, even a little bit. Splitting your shelf in groups containing less than 100 items would already be enough, especially if your collection contains 200+ editions of books blatantly plagiarizing JRR Tolkien.

Labels: anobii, books, GeekDiary, goodreads, librarything, personal, shelfari

posted by GiacomoL @ 5:54 PM 0 comments links to this post

14 August 2008

"Which social-literary networking site should I choose?"

After a few days wasted switching between various sites, I have to pick one (or two, max) and stick with it, so I tried to determine which one had more chances to survive in the long run.

Data from Compete.com seems to say that GoodReads is winning the battle on literary social networking.

Librarything, despite a huge head-start (years), seems to be in decline, even though attention data suggests that the remaining members spend a bit more time on the site than the average GR member.

Note how aNobii seems to be such a minor player, even though it's the dominant application in Italy and probably lists more books than its competitors; I wonder if Compete's data is skewed towards US/UK visitors. It has to be said that aNobii is showing more velocity though, so it will be interesting to see how things fare in a few months.

Shelfari is also in the mix, still below Librarything but growing fast. The site is very well presented, but I hated that it used Yet Another Format to import books (apparently, more oriented to listing the condition of your books, which I guess has to be expected from a site backed by ABEbooks), and I couldn't be bothered to try it.

Labels: anobii, books, GeekDiary, librarything, shelfari, web2.0

posted by GiacomoL @ 8:44 AM 2 comments links to this post

Export your books from aNobii to GoodReads

This is a quick & dirty hack to translate your book data from the CSV file produced by aNobii to the format accepted by GoodReads (and LibraryThing, apparently). The main advantages of this approach are that you will maintain your reviews and rating, and if GoodReads fails to find a book it will tell you the title (whereas if you just use a list of ISBNs, it won't).
Cons: I couldn't be bothered to mess with strptime, so you might lose your reading date; also, all your books will be imported with the default status ("read" for me).

You can download the script from here, it works with Python 2.4 and 2.5 (probably 2.3 as well). Feel free to improve it, I scratched my itch so I'm happy as it is.

Labels: anobii, foreverythingelsetherespython, GeekDiary, goodreads, librarything