If, like me, your interest in books is larger than average, you should take a look at LibraryThing. It’s not new – it launched years ago but has evolved into a very interesting social networking site for bibliophiles.

LibraryThing has some 19,106,680 books at the moment of writing. In addition to English, it is available in French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Danish. And it has lots of users, which makes it interesting as a social networking site.

”I want it! Now, what do I do?”

Getting started is easy. Go to LibraryThing.com and create an account in mere minutes. It’s free for up to 200 books. After that, the price is 10 USD for a year and 25 USD for a lifetime.

Then you start adding books by clicking the tab ”Add books”. You search for the book you want to add, and you can search by a number of criteria, e.g. title, author and ISBN.

LibraryThing searches the Library of Congress, all five national Amazon sites, and more than 80 world libraries. It even searches the Norwegian National Library. If you’re a pro, you can use a bar-code scanner and import batches of ISBN numbers.

You can also tag your books to categorize them according to how you think of them, not how some official librarian does. Thus one person might tag Shakespeare’s sonnets “poetry” while another tags it “tacky, romantic, boring,” and still another only “favorite.”

Tags are particularly useful for searching and sorting, for instance when you need a list of all your novels or all the books you keep at the office.

You can sort your books by author, title and many other fields by clicking on the name of the field. LibraryThing even lets you subsort by the last sort. So, if you want to sort by author, and title within author, click “title” to sort by title, and then “author” to sort by author and subsort by title.

MySpace for books

LibraryThing isn’t just about cataloging your books. It’s a community of book lovers. You can review books and read other peoples’ reviews, but there’s more:

You can check out other people’s libraries, see who has the most similar library to yours, swap reading suggestions and so forth. LibraryThing also makes book recommendations based on the collective intelligence of the other libraries.

You can also connect with other members by joining or creating a group. Make a group for a club, a class, a subject, or even a private group for you and your friends.

Behind the Zeitgeist tab you can get an overview of what’s going on in the LibratyThing community: Which books and authors are most popular, who has the largest libraries, which are the most reviewed books, what are the top tags, and more.

You can show your library to others by directing them to the URLs listed on your profile page. There are also widgets that lets you share your books on your blog or web site.

Want more? Read more about LibraryThing here:

WikiThing, the LibraryThing wiki
LibraryThing Tour
Very Short Intro to LibraryThing
LibraryThing for libraries