Jules Jones

Tuesday Thingers has moved since I last took part, and is currently hosted by Wendi's Book Corner. This week's question:

Do you use a rating system on your blog? How do you feel about using the rating system provided on sites like Library Thing and Amazon? When looking up information on a book you are interested in, do you use the ratings provided by these sites (or similar sites) to help you make the decision on purchasing the book?

I don't bother using a rating system on my blog nowadays. This is partly because if I don't like a book, I'm not always sure whether it's me or the book -- I suffered some memory damage a few years ago and couldn't read at all for a couple of years, and although I've recovered, I still occasionally bounce off books for reasons connected with that episode rather than either the intrinsic quality of the book or how well it matches my reading tastes. I think it's also a lot more useful to both myself and to other people to set out what I did or didn't like about the book, and why.

There are also occasional books where it would be unfair for me to give a star rating, because my personal rating of the book doesn't match how I think the book might work for other people. A particular example of this would be the manga Confidential Confessions 1. I didn't even finish it, because it simply wasn't my thing; but I'm not the target audience and I could see that it was probably a good book for those who are. How do you give a simple star rating in those circumstances?

With looking up books on LT and Amazon, I can find the star rating useful, but it's really the spread of ratings that's useful rather than the average, and even that is in connection with the text reviews rather than by themselves. For example, sometimes there's a clear love/hate divide on a book, which is useful to know as long as there's enough information in the text reviews for me to assess which camp I'm likely to fall into.

Amazon requires you to give a star rating to post a review, and LibraryThing doesn't. This is why I have more book reviews on LT than on Amazon nowadays.

Today's question, hosted by Bostonbibliphile: LT Things- t-shirts, bags,cue cats- are you into the "stuff"? Do you use a cuecat to enter your books, or do you enter them manually? What do you think of the stuff?

I've got a cuecat, and I thought it was wonderful when I was trying to enter a large number of books in a hurry last year. It only works on books with a standard ISBN barcode, and it takes a bit of practice, but you can run through a stack of books very quickly once you're set up. For only one or two books it's quicker to type the ISBN by hand, so I'm not using it much at the moment, but I don't regret buying it.

The rest of the stuff... It's nice stuff, and if I really needed another tote bag or teeshirt (and lived in the US, because postage adds up), I'd be perfectly happy to play walking billboard for LT. I like the designs, and I like the site. But I've been going to sf cons for over a decade, and already have more than enough of that sort of stuff. Pretty much a lifetime supply, in fact. So I'm not really tempted to add to the collection.

And... I remembered to go and look at this week's prompt for Tuesday Thingers, in spite of being spaced out on cold medication and lack of sleep.

Today's question: Early Reviewers- do you participate? How many books (approximately) have you received through the program? Have you liked them generally? What's your favorite ER book? Do you participate in the discussion group on LT?

I signed up for Early Reviewers very early on in the programme, but then didn't put in for books for a few months because I was in the throes of moving. Once I was settled again, I started putting my name in for the draw, and so far I've received two review copies through the programme. Both were relatively early on, when the ratio of requests to copies available wasn't quite so high.

I've enjoyed both books I received. Gents is one I might have bought for myself anyway -- in fact, I think I may have read a review of it when it was first released back in 1997, and thought then that it sounded interesting. Pandora in the Congo is one I might not have picked up if I'd seen it in a bookshop, but the blurb intrigued me when I was reading the descriptions of the books available in the ER programme that month, and it ended up as my third choice of three I thought I might enjoy. So for me ER has brought me one enjoyable book I might otherwise never have read.

I used to be fairly active on the discussion group, but that was before I went back to working full-time at a day job with a much longer commute than I've ever had before. I just don't have time and energy at the moment for a lot of my usual online discussion, although as I get less tired just from the shock of Having A Job, I'm picking some of it up again. I miss the ER group. Maybe if I score a review copy this month...

This week's Tuesday Thingers prompt, as ever hosted by TheBostonBibliophile:

Today's question: Favorite bookstores. What's your favorite bookstore? Is it an online store or a bricks-and-mortar store? How often do you go book shopping? Is your favorite bookstore (or bookstores) listed as a favorite in LT? Do you attend events at local bookstores? Do you use LT to find events?

My favourite bookstore is Bookbuyers in Mountain View, California. It's a large second-hand shop specialising in genre fiction, and non-fiction, although it covers other areas as well. In particular, the fiction department has a massive science fiction and fantasy collection, including many titles that are out of print and thus not available new. Just to make things perfect, next door is a branch of Books Inc, a local independent chain selling new books. So if it's not in one store, you can try the other.

The first time I went in there I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. It was the biggest selection of sf&f I'd seen (though I've seen bigger since), and it had a whole lot of books I'd fallen in love with in my local library as a teenager. And more books by the same authors.

I'd never seen some of those books on sale before. They hadn't made it out of the US rights area, as far as I know. I had a bit of a buying binge. And I kept on buying books -- sometimes books I already owned, but which I'd had to leave in storage when I first moved to the uS for what was *supposed* to be a couple of years. Or cheap second copies of something I already owned and had access to, but wanted to take on a trip with me. If they were a cheap second copy, I wouldn't mind if I had to abandon them halfway through due to weight issues.

I've moved back to the UK now, so I don't go shopping there any more. But I have fond memories still, and when LibraryThing Local was introduced, I went to add it to the database. And found that someone had beaten me to it. :-)

Missed last week's because day job was hectic and I was too wiped out to even read blogs, let alone compose a post. This week's prompt is:

Today's topic: Book-swapping. Do you do it? What site(s) do you use? How did you find out about them? What do you think of them? Do you use LT's book-swapping column feature for information on what to swap? Do you participate in any of the LT communities that discuss bookswapping, like the Bookmooch group for example?

I don't use the book-swapping sites, for two simple reasons. One is that "swapping" implies that books will leave my possession. This is against the natural order of things, and not to be countenanced. The other is that until recently I lived a very short walk from a large used bookshop specialising in non-fiction and genre fiction, and I could buy books in there for less than the cost of postage on the book-swapping sites.

As a direct consequence of the second reason, I'm having to budge very slightly on the first. The To Be Read pile has grown to the size of a small mountain range, and I have been told by Other Half that I am not to buy any more bookcases, and that I am not to leave the books in piles on the floor, either. Thus, I must discipline myself and make some feeble gestures in the direction of a new book into the house means an old book leaving.

Which still leaves me with no good reason to join a book-swapping site, because the only reason I'm going to be getting rid of a book is that I've just had a shopping accident and need more space on the shelf. Swapping books will not reduce the actual book population as required...

Missed Tuesday Thingers last week, but am back this week. This week's Tuesday Thingers prompt:

Last week I asked what was the most popular book in your library- this week I'm going to ask about the most unpopular books you own. Do you have any unique books in your library- books only you have on LT? How many? Did you find cataloging information on your unique books, or did you hand-enter them? Do they fall into a particular category or categories, or are they a mix of different things? Have you ever looked at the "You and none other" feature on your statistics page, which shows books owned by only you and one other user? Ever made an LT friend by seeing what you share with only one other user?

I've got 27 titles shared with only one other user -- and oddly, it's the same user in the case of "Star Cops: Little Green Men" and "Rome Insight Travel Map"

For the ones where it's just me, it's quite a mix, covering a wide range of categories:
( Read more... )

This week's prompt: "how many books do you have cataloged in your LibraryThing account? How do you decide what to include- everything you have, everything you've read - and are there things you leave off?"

Right now I've got 907 books catalogued. My default is that if I own it and it's a book-like object, it gets catalogued. I've now catalogued most of the books I currently have physical access to (a lot are in storage), and I usually add books to the catalogue as soon as I acquire them.

"Getting rid of books" was not part of my worldview until recently, but I'm facing up to the fact that I need to be realistic about whether I will read a book again. As I dispose of books, I'm going to leave them in my LT catalogue, but tag them as disposed of (probably with an annotation as to how they were disposed of). If nothing else, I want a record of the fact that I once owned the book and was willing to part with it, so that I don't accidentally buy another copy.

So far I haven't added books that I've read but never owned. My original reason for getting a LibraryThing account was to have a catalogue of my book collection for insurance purposes, so what I wanted was an accurate record of books that I owned, or had owned but no longer did. And I haven't read many books that weren't my personal property in the two years I've had a LibraryThing account -- something to do with an excellent second-hand bookshop being closer than local library at the time I started the account. But I've been writing reviews of the few library books that I have borrowed, and I'd like to post the reviews on LT; plus it would be useful to have those books in my catalogue to feed into the various useful social networking features. So I may start adding "read but not owned" books, suitably tagged. I might have done so already, but I wanted to wait for the long-promised collections feature.

So far I haven't left off anything, but I did think long and hard about some of the books I've bought for writing research. They're not books I really want to have conversations about with workmates and family... If collections ever happen, they may end up in a private collection.

Index post for the blogring's responses to this week's prompt.