Thing #16

Librarything reminded me very much of doing a search in Amazon.com except that it wasn't actually selling books here. I did a search of an author and non-fiction books that I have read and enjoyed. I found the site to be very informative. There have been times when I thought about getting a book that I may have heard about somewhere and this would allow me to preview the book before buying. I also thought the capability to sometimes get free books in order to review them was a neat idea.

I tried the suggester and the unsuggester. While I know that nothing is foolproof, I really thought the unsuggester was way off. While a couple of the books made sense to "unsuggest". Some really had no noticeable connection at all to the original book. Therefore, I didn't really see how they could use the book I was interested in to decide I wouldn't like this other particular book. For example, I looked up a Christian perspective personal finance book that I have read and enjoyed. While the unsuggester did include one book called Shopaholic that was obviously the opposite to my original book, it also unsuggested several Christian books and a book totally unrelated, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I can see how this option would be useful, but it had a lot of quirks to it.

I also noticed that the site included some book-selling and book swap sites. One of them is one that I use all the time, alibris.com. The ability to form groups and have book discussions through this site could be very useful. I have been in several book clubs and this would allow home-bound people to take part in those if they had internet access.