MyLibrary: searching within
posted in technology, web 2.0 |Wired’s article, the aforementioned Google’s My Library Takes on Shelfari and LibraryThing, pretty much sums up the current major players in the “catalog your books online” business (other similar sites worth noting include GuruLib and goodreads). I happen to have accounts at all three book sites–MyLibrary, Shelfari, and LibraryThing; I like (and dislike) aspects of all of these services.
My take on MyLibrary:
- Search: MyLibrary’s search features have their basis in Google’s Custom Search Engine. To the extent that the MyLibrary search works, this is a handy feature for finding passages within books. Thus far, MyLibrary is the only book cataloging site that enables searching within books.
- Comprehensiveness (or lack thereof): When I imported ISBN’s into Google, Google could not find all of my books. It actually missed over 100 ISBNs of books that I had in LibraryThing; it would have taken a good deal of time to look up these ISBNs and then do a Google Book Search to see if they had any additions of the book at all (so I didn’t do it). Thus, it seems that Google needs to keep a going with the indexing and scanning. The more books it recognizes the more useful it becomes. For now, LibraryThing and Shelfari are able to recognize more ISBN’s, since they pull their data from myriad bibliographic book sites on the web (such as Amazon and the Library of Congress).
- Allowable quantity: MyLibrary allows users to add an unlimited amount of books into their library. Shelfari also offers unlimited cataloging; LibraryThing limits free accounts to 200 books (paid membership is not costly, either $10 (year) or $25 (life)).
- About the Book Page: MyLibrary provides a great deal of book and related information on the results page depending on what’s available for a particular book; this information can include links to reviews, popular passages, references from web pages, references from books, other editions, references from scholarly works, and about the author, related books, key terms (view sample About the Book page). Shelfari and LibraryThing also incorporate a great deal of book-related information (and they seem to have more active participants in tagging currently), but neither site matches MyLibrary’s extra features that come from its affiliation with the king of search (such as popular passages or outward links to references from web pages).
- Social Features: MyLibrary offers each user a public page, RSS feed capability, and options to write reviews and to rate and label books; these are nice features but MyLibrary does lack the high degree of social functionality made possible by features such as LibraryThing’s Groups and Shelfari Groups.
To learn more about MyLibrary, visit Google’s MyLibrary homepage or the MyLibrary FAQ. Or, if you prefer to abstain from using Google in at least this one aspect of life, check out the systems in place for cataloging your books at Shelfari (thumbs up for the AJAX components, ease of tagging, and groups) or LibraryThing (thumbs up for blog, the groups, and the myriad ways to add books).
Speaking of online cataloging and organization, Mashable just posted an annotated list of 20+ Media cataloging sites. Wikipedia also has a list of social cataloging applications. Go nuts!
