Social Networking for Book Nerds

Does you library live in cyberspace too?

Hermione Buckland-Hoby on The Guardian blog looks at the rise of the virtual bookshelf and takes a look at social networking sites for the literati.

I have a bookshelf up on my Facebook profile, and it's nice to see what others are reading too.

I am as in love with LibraryThing as ever, not so much for social networking (most interactions don't get much further than "Hi! Nice library!") but because it really does help me to organise my ever-growing collection. Also, they look so pretty when they flash up in the sidebar of the blog, and it's good that I am reminded from time to time of the titles I haven't got round to yet!

(I've added too more widgets there so as well as random books from my library, you can see my most recent additions and a selection of the books I've tagged "Malaysian".)

If you live nearby and can promise to return what you borrow within a reasonable time frame and in good condition, then you are welcome to borrow. (And if you don't return them, I can always put your wanted poster on this blog!)

I now have 1729 books listed though I keep finding books on my shelves I've accidentally omitted ... and still can't bring myself to add Abu's yellowing thrillers or my teaching books. The main categories are fiction (801), non-fiction (658), novel (619), british (399), american (203), malaysian (186), short stories (130), history (106), travel (103), poetry (99).

I've been acquiring books apace (28 so far this month!) many of them bought cheaply from warehouse sales and discount bookshops. (Was at the Payless Sale last weekend and BookXcess yesterday.) Many others have been given to me - many as review copies given by authors, bookshops and distributors. (One of the perks of blogging about books.)

I've also managed (thanks to AbeBooks) to track down a couple of English translations of Malay novels (which should never have gone out of print in the first place) : I've now got Harry Aveling's translation of A. Samad Said's Salina which I want to read side by side with the original, and Adibah Amin's No Harvest but a Thorn (a translation of Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan).

I will eventually bequeath my library to the nation ... though by the time I shuffle off this mortal coil you will probably all be reading ebooks anyway - or maybe you will have devices fitted into your brain that download all the content of all the books ever published directly into your brain.

Shelfish Reasons

I recognise the symptoms of what BookLust calls Bibliomania, "the best disease bar none" only too well ...

She does rather make things worse though by suggesting a list of guides to book collecting which I know simply must have. Am now running out of shelf space again and a big reshuffle of my shelves is planned which will probably take weeks ... and I dread it, not so much because I hate cleaning (which I do) but because I keep finding old friends on the shelves and have to sit down and read them.

I've acquired a tiny handheld vacuum cleaner which will be just the thing for cleaning the books without realising clouds of dust into the air. It was a free gift from the nice folks at the car workshop after I spent many thousands on repairs to parts of the innards I didn't even know existed. (The money that could have been better spent on antique bookshelves and numerous rare first editions.)

I've noticed that there's nothing bibliomaniacs (that's you guys!) love to talk about more than how they organize their collection. (The idea of organising a book collection by colour prompted a lot of discussion and made me realise just how many different ways there are to organise books ... and how idiosyncratic we all are!)

The topic comes up again today on the Guardian blog where Sarah Crown makes a plea for advice, as she struggles to reshelf her books after a house move:

Believe me, I've tried nearly everything. I used to favour the popular "by genre" approach: different shelves for poetry, plays, fiction, non-fiction, travel, cookery ... The problem there, though, is that the travel shelf ends up only half-full, and then you're faced with the problem of what to complete it with. So you pick cookery, but cookery spills over onto the next shelf ... and so it goes. Even if you decide that, despite its flaws, the genre system is for you, there are further choices to be made. Do you organise each genre alphabetically? Do you attempt the infinitely tricky but profoundly impressive, if you can pull it off, genre-bleed - science into sci-fi, history books into historical fiction?

I enjoyed the reader comments, suggesting all kinds of solutions I would never have thought of, including:

• organising books by the price you paid for them
• putting heavier books at either end of a shelf so they don't warp (invented by an engineer)

If, like Kak Teh the other day, you simply have too many books and need to cull them, why not bookcross them? This is a tad risky in Malaysia where most people don't seem to understand the concept, but you could donate them to the local bookcrossing group or leave them on the bookcrossing shelf at Silverfish. (From which I seem to pick up more titles than I leave, which isn't the point, really.)

There are also a number of bookswapping sites now on the internet and the Librarything blog has done a good job of highlighting these recently, and here's a list of sites they recommend:

• Title Traders
• SwapThing
• Lendmonkey
• Bookins
• Swapsimple
• Bookmooch
• WhatsOnMyBookshelf

I don't mind getting rid of books - but it always seems to be that the books I get rid of seem a little further down the line to be the books I need desperately to refer to ... and I end up buying another copy!

Postscript

Someone added the best suggestion yet on the blog ... arrange your books in dinner-party order i.e. according to which authors would most like to sit by each other. I love that!

Tagged and Totalled

Still haven't got all my books entered into Library Thing. I'm going slowly, trying to do a shelf each week. My fiction and poetry is mostly in there already, and most of the books still to be entered are his war stories which reflect a fascination for the Vietnam and Second World War, spy stories and serial killers. (Boys stuff!) Don't tell him, but I may secretly recycle to charity some of the thrillers which are mouldering away, to make shelf-space for new books. (Mine!)

My total number of entered books to date is 1,206 and the most common tags are:

fiction (529), non-fiction (449), novel (405), british (282), american (126), malaysia (110), travel (93), short stories (90), history (82), poetry (70) (and here's my tag cloud)

Fiction is winning, but only just.

Generally, we only think about shelving books by broad subject topics or alphabetically. Thanks to the tags, LibraryThing shows you how books you'd never put together as neighbours in a bookshelf might have much in common thematically. The geeky part of me that wanted to be a librarian once, approves.

The site also keeps getting better with new innovations all the time, something I didn't expect when I signed up for a life membership. And no, I don't have shares. (Sadly.)

I love the widget that shows you books from my library in the sidebar of my blog, changing every 20 minutes so you can admire all those pretty covers. And now, if you look just below that, there's a search tool so you can find out more easily what I have and in some cases, how I rate it. A good place to waste time!

I also like this new feature: pictures of the authors of my books. How many can you recognise? How funny to think of all those strange folks sitting side by side on my bookshelves, talking to each other. (I think the happiest neighbours are novelists Kureishi and Kunzru, who have a lot in common in real life too.)

Bookshelves Real and Virtual

Have acquired new bookshelves just as a drastic cull was imminent to make space for new acquisitions. Books pour in (purchases I can't help making, review copies, gifts, freebies from the bookcrossing pile in Raman's shop - this week alone 11 new books!).

3rd chimp a.k.a Ms. Wonderley bequeathed me a wonderful big glassfronted cupboard which was transported across PJ in my gardener's wife's father's brother-in-law's lorry yesterday. And I managed to find room for a huge custom-made bookshelf downstairs too. All this delaying the day when I have to make a Sophie's choice about which books to keep and which to pass along down the line.

And then there's my bookshelf in cyberspace! I threw out the link to Library Thing a few weeks ago hoping you'd find it an interesting novelty and play with it while I was in Manila, and not notice I was away. Then I noticed that CW had got hooked on it and I so enjoyed looking through her library online that I decided to try it out for myself ... and found it completely addictive. I even paid for a life membership.

Some of the great things about Library Thing:

• even if you are on the other side of the world, you can gaze lovingly at your book collection and don't have to dust it!
• your friends know which books you have and which they can ask to borrow (I lend books all the time and just pray they come back!)
  
• you can see deep inside people's souls by browsing the books they have for mental furniture (a great way to find a mate if you don't have one - whose book collection will best mesh with yours?)
• you can paste up your reviews, make notes, give a star rating ... and read what others thought about the book
  
• you can put an ever-changing display of books on your blog sidebar
  
• you can link it in with Amazon Associates and theoretically earn money from click through purchases (does anyone ever earn anything from this?)
  
• you can sort your books in many different ways - the tag cloud feature is wonderful
• you don't have to spend hours typing in boring book details - the keyword search is really quick and effective
  

My virtual library is here. (Can be displayed as a list or graphic bookshelf.) I am slowly entering books, a few everyday, so if the collection seems a bit unbalanced at the moment it's because I'm working systematically across my (real life) bookshelves. It is, as they say a work in progress and I will have many happy hours cataloguing the rest. (Can hear you saying "How sad is that? Get a life, girl.")

Library Thing

In case you're at a lose end while I'm gone, why don't you spend some time cataloguing the books in your collection with the help of LibraryThing? I daren't even start on this ...