Drinking the LibraryThing Kool-Aid

Well, since LibraryThing added support for finding books on Amazon, it is much much easier for me to add things to my collection. I think I’m going to use LibraryThing to track my graphic novel/manga collection. I’m curious to find out if I’ll hit the 200 book limit for a free account or not.

A couple nitpicks:

It is showing that I have many duplicate copies, when I think I just happen to have many books in a series that have the same title. I assume that the duplicate copies listing is drawn from the book title – it might be better for it to be based on ISBNs. Someone may have multiple translations of a classic work like The Castle or someone (theoretically) may own 11 volumes of Fruits Basket. It looks confusing when these things are listed as duplicates.

The “display style 1 2 3 4 5” option caused me some problems when I was entering items while I was really sleep-deprived. Sometimes I think that extreme sleep deprivation is good when usability testing – you might be mimicking the state of mind of someone who isn’t paying close attention to screen instructions, etc. In my case, I kept thinking that the “1 2 3 4 5” was in reference to the number of pages in my collection, because some of the styles don’t seem to be very distinct from one another. I clicked around for awhile before I realized that one number showed me book covers and the other ones didn’t. I think it would be more useful to have a pull-down menu that would allow people to switch between display styles, with some more descriptive text like:
display style “book covers”, “by title”, “by book summary”, “by entry date”, etc.

I am liking LibraryThing much more than I was a few days ago.