Fungible Convictions

After the site was crippled by a rush of publicity, LibraryThing.com is up and slowly running, available for you to self-catalog your own book collection. I’m totally going to sacrifice a weekend of being social to add and tag my collection—it will at least give myself the illusion of control over my weakening shelves.

One cool feature? You can view book covers on your computer screen as if the books themselves were faced out on a shelf—certainly impossible in the real world for any but the most shelf-ed (or anti-literate) of people.

What I still want, though, is for publishers to package an eBook version of a book with the print version that you buy. Imagine not only LibraryThing but also an iTunes-type library that stores electronic, easily searchable versions of everything you read. The saddest thing about bookshelves is that over time the books on them become decorative. But if you were to run a search on, say, Google Desktop and Google Desktop had access to electronic versions of your library, you just re-animated your print collection and made print copies that much more valuable.