Librarything.com - Catalog Your Books & Share Libraries

LibraryThing is a new site for book lovers. And they're not even selling anything. It's basically two sites in one --it helps you create a personal catalog of your own books, while also learning the favorite books of others. That's pretty cool, and probably accounts for the huge popularity of this site. A free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books (you can pay $10 a year to catalog more), Your catalog shows all the books you've entered. You can look at your catalog in either "list" or "cover" view (yes, the actual cover shot). You can search your books, sort your books, apply "tags", and rate your books/write reviews. Then you can share your catalog with others and obviously peek inside others catalogs as well. With over 225,000 users and 16 million books in the system, your bound to find quite a few "book-mates." Actually, this site might be a great springboard for a dating site!

LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth.

Ah, books. Remember those archaic things? Luckily, books still seem alive and well in our hyper-kinetic hi-tech world and this site proves how much people adore books of all kinds. As important, this site merges the best of social networking with the best of good search engines with the best of personal collecting. This site is a killer.

The creator jokes about sitting on top of piles of money with the no-to-low fees he charges for this site, but he/she absolutely should be making a fortune. And with no shame. This site is brilliant and good for our society/culture. Where are the corporate sponsorships? This site should be making as much money as any of those social networking sites and absolutely has the potential to do so with the right marketing pitch (the alexa traffic ranking is fantastic, to start with!). Go for it.