DISQUS

AndrewB · 2 years ago

Welcome to LibraryThing - it's a brilliant website, especially with the very active discussions with "touchstones" that link to authors and titles within the site.

It pays to note that as well as Amazon and the LoC, you can choose from around 50 worldwide libraries (LT uses free Z39.50 connections from these Libraries to search data) to search from and find works to add to your collection.

As for importing from Delicious Library - the site has a "Universal Import" on the "Joy" tab - this will accept practically any kind of file format or even copy/pasted links. It scans through the file and pulls out the ISBN's which it then places into a queue and queries them against the sources of your choice. Depending on how many other people have ISBN's in the queue will affect how long your import will take, as they have to limit the number of queries they push onto sites like Amazon and the Libraries.

If you have any questions, feature requests or bug reports - see the discussion groups under the "Groups" tab, there's a heading entitled "Standing Groups", which are all the site-related groups.

webomatica · 2 years ago

Hi Andrew, thanks for the additional info. Although the LibraryThing book entry setup is pretty convenient through the web interface, the ability to import data from Delicious etc. is a huge plus. I think I'll be checking out LibraryThing again just to test out that feature...

AndrewB · 2 years ago

Sure thing :-) It pays to note LT cannot currently extract any other data from your import, apart from the ISBNs. It's just considered too darn complicated to create an import that supports every possible file format by the variety of cataloguing apps (not to mention home-cooked spreadsheets etc).

But maybe one day we'll see such a feature - the site is still young, but backed by ABEbooks and an enthusiastic and growing team. The thing I like is LT may not be extremely "Web 2.0 pretty" but it is heavy on data, I find similar sites too focussed on good looks rather than features and quality/quantity of data.

webomatica · 2 years ago

Thanks. Coincidentally, I noticed this article on ZDnet about social websites and portability of data... something I'm interested in.

Glad to see you folks are thinking ahead and realizing that once I as a user gets all my book data into in your site, I might want to get it back out someday.