Thinging Through Tuesday

[julesjones]

It's two years this week since I set up my LibraryThing account. The original motivation was to get an off-site catalogue of my books for insurance purposes, but it's become a lot more than that. The social networking side of it is *fun*. Amongst other things, I joined the Early Reviewers programme, which does pretty much what it says on the tin. Publishers supply review copies of books, programme members indicate which ones they'd be interested in, and the LibraryThing database is used to select good matches to review the book based on what people have in their catalogues. We get free books, and the publishers get reviews and word of mouth.

This week I did two things connected with LT. I posted my first review of a book I received through the Early Reviewers programme. And I set up a WordPress account to join a group blog, which meant I had a spare personal blog lying around as well. I decided that it would be a useful place to mirror my book and DVD reviews from my LiveJournal -- and then wandered over to the LibraryThing forums and found a thread suggesting that we set up a book blogging circle for the ER group. Serendipity...

So you'll find the new bookblog here: http://julesjones.wordpress.com/
I don't expect it to have anything that's not on my LJ, but it's another way to pick up my reviews, LT-related posts, and the occasional serious writing post. There's a section on the blogroll for the LibraryThing Early Reviewers blogcircle, and we're planning to do a regular LibraryThing group blogging exercise. The Boston Bibliophile is our host for Thinging Through Tuesday, and the first post is here.

Comments

[sasha-bee.livejournal.com]

:-) thanks for participating! the social side turned out to be more fun for me than i anticipated, too- i got into LT to find new outlets for my geekery! and it worked! :-)

Oops...hope I didn't post this in another spot...

[j-kaye-book-blog.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Hi, wanted to stop by. Found your blog on LT's Early Reviewers and have signed up for the fun Tuesday event! :)

[steph-vaughan.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Haven't yet done Library Thing, but the early reviewers' program sounds interesting. I'm so ridiculously picky in my reading material, I'd hate to give some undeserving soul a less than stellar review just because I'm hard to please.

Do you catalog both paper and e-books?

[julesjones]

If it's got an ISBN, it gets catalogued.

Also, authors who have a book available through Amazon get an author page listing their books, like so:
http://www.librarything.com/author/vaughanstephanie

Authors who get an account can join the LT Author programme (which at the moment gets you a shiny badge to put on your personal profile, and your name in the list of LT Authors). They used to require you to catalogue at least 50 books before you could do so, then dropped that -- but it is being loudly suggested that the requirement be reinstated, because we've had a spate of authors getting an LT account simply to spam-promote their books to members.