With the overwhelming majority of readers still buying books, instead of going to their local library, many like to have a nice way to organize what they’re reading, share it with the world and give their take on it. So, like any other popular forms of media, several websites and applications have been born to do these tasks. I’ve chosen four of the best. So enter, best websites to keep track of yor books.

Shelfari

If you are looking for a product that does it all, and looks gorgeous, Shelfari delivers. They cover almost all aspects – from getting connected to friends, to selecting your books, to embedding your current reads in your blog or website. They make it extremely easy and user friendly, while delivering a beautiful look and feel at the same time.

• A gorgeous graphical user interface, that is incredibly user friendly.
• Give book reviews and ratings.
• Embed books on your blog or website.
• Find friends and family to share your books with.
• Join groups with your likes to discover new titles.
• Get e-mail updates from friends and groups.
• Communicate with authors.

Features:

Easy to use drop-down interface, to select the current status on a title.

A look at your user profile, where you’ll see the current book(s) you are reading, plan to read or have already read.

A preview image, provided by Shelfari, of what you can embed in your website or blog. A great way to communicate to friends and family, not only about your current books, but also about Shelfari itself.

Goodreads

Another great cataloging site that doesn’t quite have the same nice GUI interface as Shelfari, but is still incredibly simple and still has a lot of the same capability. Goodreads has the funding behind them and have a huge loyal following.

If you are looking for a site that has a huge database of recommendations, friends and groups then Goodreads is a solid selection.

• Add and remove an endless amount of books.
• Give book reviews and ratings.
• Share your books, book reviews and comments with friends and family.
• Get great recommendations based upon your ratings.
• Get continuous e-mail updates on your friend’s and family’s books.
• Communicate with authors.
• Get book specials and deals.

Features:

An example of what one of my friends is reading. I’m not displaying anything, but below this you will see books your friends have read in the past, their reviews, and their rating.

A look at my current bookshelf. What I’ve read, my ratings, my reviews, and future books.

LibraryThing

Librarything isn’t all that much different from the previous sites I have mentioned. It has a lot of the same capability, but has been around much longer then the others, so it has a much bigger following.

• Enter up to 200 books for free. After 200, it’s $10/year or $25/life.
• Huge tagging engine, with tag cloud and other options.
• Catalog from Amazon, Library of Congress and almost 700 other libraries.
• The ability to request early reviews of unreleased books.
• Yet another that includes a recommendation engine.
• Get information on local visits from authors, or book clubs.
• Forums, groups, books covers, you name it, they’ve got it.
• Offline desktop installation.
• Track Books, DVDs, Music and Games
• Add items through your webcam, by barcode scanning
• Import items through spreadsheets or LibraryThing

A look at a ‘book profile’ and some of the details it displays.

There are many many groups to join and collaborate with.

Libra (Desktop App)

Libra’s desktop application is an offline media storing program that you can use to track not only books, but DVDs, games and music as well. The program is free and has no limits, but it does lack any online connection. It does have the ability to link to Amazon books, and uses its search ability to find books, but you do not have the ability to view your collections online.

Check out Simon’s review of Libra here.

A look at your bookshelf through Libra.

A book’s profile after you click on an item.

Other Notables:

Gurulib
Listal
Amazon YourMediaLibrary

As you can see, there are a few other options out there for tracking your book collections. All of them have their own unique features and abilities. From my own personal opinion, the most user friendly and most feature rich choice, is Shelfari. However, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed with any of the other choices. Try them all out for a while, and form your own opinion.

Which of these do you like? Do you know of any sites or applications that you use besides these? Let us know.

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Today I want to introduce you to a different type of social network that can help you collect material about the things you like. While you expand your profile, collect links and connect with others, you’re teaching the tool what you like and it will suggest more things you may be interested in. Could that be your thing?

Twine is a semantic web application and a new type of social network. The idea is to have one central place where you can collect, organize, discover and share anything you find relevant, with the semantic side of the tool tracking your interests and helping you discover more things you may like.

Twine unites many different elements of other platforms such as Digg and Delicious. Here is a summary of its most important features:

• social bookmarking
• archive for things found online or things you upload
• user groups (Twines) to share and discover topic-based material
• blog style posts to add items, which can also be commented by others
• recommendations for you to discover related things

Getting started always is the most difficult part, but it’s rather simple with Twine. Given you are convinced this might be your thing, you should jump right into it. Sign up, create a profile, list your interests, add the bookmarklet (get it, it’s useful!), explore the most popular Twines (groups) and join ones you like.

From there it’s easy. Twine has already learned a little bit about you and will continue to learn as you’re using it. It will soon start suggesting other Twines or people you may be interested in. For now you can follow the Twines you joined through your Interest Feed or join eMail updates, browse Twines randomly, collect posts you really like (note the share and collect buttons over each post), eventually connect to others who seem to enjoy the same things you do, and most of all submit your own material.

You should start at least one personal Twine, so you can add stuff that may not fit into any of the Twines you’re a member of or to keep some of the things you add private. Once you come across something on the web you would like to add, use the Twine bookmarklet you were offered during signup and you’ll see it’s extremely convenient to use! Alternatively, you can manually add stuff through the website’s Add Item menu, as pictured below.

Once you get the hang of things you may become a regular contributor to existing Twines and/or feed and promote your own Twines. Either way, information will now be flowing into channels and you can potentially gain a lot from it, without having to cruise half a dozen pages for pretty much the same effect. You can stay informed and entertained in an organized way, while socializing (sort of) at the same time.

For a much more detailed review also covering the technology behind Twine please visit Think Artificial.

So what do you say, could this be your thing? It certainly is my thing!

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When you keep going on like this, you’ll eventually lose track of the where, the how and the what of your collection. To create some order in this chaos, we need to use collector programs. One of the best and free collection suites is Libra. Read on for an in-depth review.

Libra, true art lies in simplicity

When trying to resolve the mess, to simplify it, it’s important to keep it down on the complication scale. It’d be pretty ridiculous if we created a mess to escape from another one.

Libra, a freeware suite for Microsoft XP and Vista, does exactly that (If you’re on Linux here are other collection manager apps you can check). It’s an absurdly simple and easy to use program that doesn’t overkill with all the extra functions and gives you pretty much all what you need.

But… How?

As previously mentioned, Libra allows you to construct a digital representation of your books, DVD’s, CD’s and games (the last one being missed out by most collection software).

Adding Media

To add an item to the Libra application, just go to the ‘Add’ tab by clicking on the top icon. Here you can use one of three ways to virtually add an item; you can search for the barcode or the title on Amazon (US, UK, DE, JP, FR or CA), add it manually by choosing a picture and filling out the forms or import it from another application (supported are Delicious Library, DVD profiler, Generic Excel, Generic Text File and LibraryThing).

One of the great functions in Libra is that you can use your webcam to scan barcodes. Using this you can speed up the digitalising a great deal. If you have a more than average collection, you’ll find this to be very usefull!

Loaning to Friends

If you look back over the years, take a look at everything you’ve ever loaned to friends. Do you think its safe to say that you’ve got all those things back? Hah, thought so.

Libra is not limited to indexing the stuff on your shelves. When its done with that, it’ll start indexing your friends (or, at least, it’ll help you do it). Once he / she’s in the program, you can say what he / she has loaned from you, when he / she loaned it from you and when you expect to get it back. This way you can make sure more stuff goes on the shelves than from it!

Making Shortcuts

Another great Libra function is the ‘Play’ component. By double-clicking an item, or pressing ‘Play’ in the item description, you can use pre-described shortcuts. By default, this will open the Amazon page of the item in question, but by using the dropdown menu in the description you can add your own shortcuts.

For instance, you can use it to open iTunes and start the CD you’ve selected. Alternatively, you can make it start movies, run games, open ebooks, etc….the possibilities are endless.

Do you use Libra for your media inventory needs? Or do you have another preferred program? Or perhaps you are an old-fashioned Microsoft Excel kind of person when it comes to keeping track of what you have on your shelves. Let us know in the comments what you prefer.

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In the process I managed to find four open source programs that all call themselves “collection managers.” That is, they all claim to make it easy to catalog and keep track of your collections of things like books, movies, and CDs.

So without further comment let’s see how well they all meet those claims. While most of them are for Linux users, some also available for Windows.

Alexandria

Alexandria (Linux) is a Gnome application specifically aimed at cataloging books. It has a simple, clean interface and it’s certainly easy to use, but it lacks many of the little frills and features of the other programs on this list. You can add books by either entering the ISBN, the author, or the title. Alexandria then searches a number of book-related websites to retrieve additional information. You will inevitably run into a book that the software can’t find, but Alexandria remedies this by allowing you to add a book’s information manually. You can also organize your books into categories, and keep track of loaned materials.

When you’re done entering your books you can then export to a handful of formats, including Tellico’s native format (which is examined in greater detail below). Overall, Alexandria may be the right choice for the beginner computer user who just wants a bare bones way to organize their personal libraries. But the existence of these other collection managers with a broader range of features and scope make it basically obsolete for the rest of us.

Griffith

Griffith (Windows, Linux) is fairly similar to Alexandria, although it’s designed specifically for movies and has a bit more of a complicated interface. All the standard features of a collection manager are on display but not much else. It does have built in support for a wide number of languages, which is great for international users, and it downloads quite a bit of information about each item – at least more than I expect from this kind of program. But its overall look just seems a bit too cluttered to me, especially given the fact that it’s a Gnome application.

Tellico

Tellico (Linux) is a program that has garnered a fair amount of attention and has the distinction of being the only app on this list specifically designed for KDE. The first thing you’ll probably notice about Tellico – and which really sets it apart from Griffith and Alexandria – is how flexible it is. It comes packaged with support for books, comic books, videos, music, coins, stamps, cards, wines, video games, and board games. Should you have slightly more obscure collecting interests, Tellico allows you to make a custom collection type. It’s not as automated as feature full as the premade collection types (which is to be expected), but it’s certainly a better option than learning to program to write your own database software.

What strikes me most about Tellico is how much deeper it is compared to the previous two programs. It can import and export a wide variety of formats, and I feel as if there’s a lot more to fiddle with. In fact, the developers seem to openly encourage any kind of tinkering, from changing basic configuration settings, to creating custom themes, to editing the script itself. Tellico’s online manual has a great deal of information – just about everything you would ever want to know about this program – so I suggest you check it out.

GCStar

GCStar (Linux) is the last program in our little list and possibly the best. As you can probably see, it integrates all the features that by now I have come to expect as standard in collection manager software. But it wraps these features in a very shiny package, rivaled only by Tellico in this area. It originated as GCfilms, a program specifically designed to catalog movie collections, but it has since expanded to cover a variety of other collection types. GCStar also boasts customization options similar to Tellico’s, which make it a great choice for experienced collectors.

Conclusion

So there you have four easy to use and helpful collection managers that I hope will make your collecting career a little easier. If not, there are plenty of other options out there. During my searching I was surprised, to say the least, at the number of programs that all do the same basic thing in basically the same way. Choosing your favorite then becomes an almost arbitrary matter, usually yielding to personal taste and comparisons of their minute differences. I chose these four programs only because they are easy to find, set up, and use. Nevertheless, there may be a better program for your personal needs and/or preferences, so please don’t hesitate to mention it in the comments below.

(By) Abraham Kurp was introduced to open source software a few years ago and it was love at first site. When not preaching the virtues of open source he enjoys reading classic science fiction, playing obscure video games, dabbling in programming, and of course writing.

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