People who aren’t in the writing and publishing business often have skewed ideas of how the business works. I’ve had to educate more than one eager friend or family member who thought the best way to promote Infoquake was to walk into Barnes & Noble and turn the book facing out on the shelf so it covers up David Eddings’ titles next door. I tell them to please stop doing this, because David Eddings sends armed hooligans to ding up my car with cricket bats every time he finds one of my books in front of his.

So now let me educate you, o blog reader, on some ways you can help pimp your favorite author, and some ways you should not pimp your favorite author.

Do…

…buy the author’s books. That’s the first and most obvious thing you can do. There’s really no need to analyze strategically which venue you should buy an author’s books from. We’re generally not so particular where you pick them up or for what price. Just buy ‘em, and read ‘em.

…buy the author’s books at their preferred venue, if you have the choice. The foregoing notwithstanding, many authors would be happy to see you buy their books from a specific venue, if it’s all the same to you. What is the author’s preferred venue? It varies. Check the author’s website (assuming they have one) to see if they have something other than the standard Amazon button listed. Lots of authors like to champion independent stores like Clarkesworld, Mysterious Galaxy, and Powell’s. Rob Sawyer politely pushes you to buy autographed copies on his eBay store.

…tell your circle of friends and acquaintances about the author’s work. Duh. Word of mouth is the absolute number one way that most books are sold these days. So aside from buying the book, the most important thing you can do to promote your favorite author is to put your mouth to work for them. Don’t feel like you need to compose a detailed essay or review; don’t be pushy or intimidating. Just spread the word, one person at a time. I’ve had people tell me how they sent emails to a groups of their friends, and then some of those people go off and email a group of their friends. It snowballs.

…use social networking tools like Digg, StumbleUpon, MySpace, and LibraryThing. See all those little funky icons at the bottom of blog posts all over the web? They lead to social networking sites that can seriously boost an author’s web traffic (and consequently, their visibility and sales). I got a surprise jump in traffic from someone who listed my post on The Return of the King on StumbleUpon. (Here’s the StumbleUpon page.) How big a jump? About 14,000 visitors in the space of a few days. That’s 14,000 potential new readers who might not have heard of me before.

…write a positive Amazon review. Don’t worry too much about the other specialty book sites out there; people may buy books from a number of different online venues, but they go to the Amazon reviews to hear the buzz. Keep in mind that generic two-line five-star reviews with no content (“David Lewis Edleman Rulez!!!!!!!”) and reviews that are obviously from friends and family (“Even if David Louis Edelman hadn’t donated a kidney to my sick child, I still would recommend his books!”) don’t help. Thoughtful critiques that don’t just summarize plot or shovel out meaningless platitudes — even critiques that contain negative impressions — are much more persuasive.

…write about the author on your own site(s) and link to the author’s website. Got a blog or a website? It may seem like a no-brainer to write reviews of your author’s favorite works. But linking to the author’s website helps in a number of other, less visible ways: with Technorati ratings, with Google rankings, with Alexa rankings, etc. Not to mention having your favorite author’s name linked on your site is a constant tickler to your web visitors, who may be inclined to purchase something on your recommendation, but who might not always remember the name of the author you recommended.

…join the author’s mailing list. Yes, lots of people get their information from RSS feeds and Tumblelogs and Facebook updates and the like. But believe it or not, email is still far and away the number one driver of Internet traffic. Some authors just send out ticklers with release dates and upcoming events; others really put their heart into it. But mailing lists give authors a simple way to get in touch with their readers all in one pop. Fellow Pyr author Kay Kenyon has a dynamite newsletter wherein she dispenses writing tips and little mini-essays about her fiction, if you’re looking for a good example. (Here’s the signup for my mailing list, if you’re interested. Just sayin’.)

…ask for the author’s work at your local bookstore. Yes, it’s a computerized world, and book chains largely stock books on their shelves based on impersonal corporate formulae developed by Darth Vader in consultation with Russian mobsters, big tobacco companies, and Dick Cheney. But that doesn’t mean that bookstore managers don’t listen to what their customers are saying. Books like The Red Tent and The Tipping Point became hits largely because of a groundswell of demand from readers. It can happen.

…suggest the author’s work at your book club or reading circle. Depending on the size of your book club, that’s a large number of potential sales all at once, and a large number of people to potentially spread the word. Plus it’s a nice little ego boost for an author to hear that a group of people specifically got together to discuss their work.

…send the author a note of encouragement. I suppose Neil Gaiman and George R.R. Martin aren’t hurting for the lack of encouraging fan mail. But keep in mind that writing is a solitary occupation; we writers don’t get the instant validation of applause when you enjoy our books. So most of us get very encouraged by fan emails, because it’s the only way we know that you’re digging what we’re doing. I’m not saying you need to write a 12-paragraph discourse on how their works have changed your life; but just letting an author know that you loved their book, will be buying more, and will be spreading the word among your friends does help. Really.

Don’t…

…feel guilty about checking the author’s work out of the library. Some fans are under the mistaken impression that checking an author’s work out of the library instead of buying it is a betrayal of sorts. It’s not. After all, libraries are paying customers too, aren’t they? Libraries keep track of which books are checked out and which molder on the shelves, and that affects their purchases of future books.

…move the author’s books around on the bookstore shelves. Ever been tempted to grab a stack of your author’s latest and sneak it over to the new releases table? Resist that temptation, pal. Believe it or not, the spots on those new release tables and window displays are often paid for by publishers. Messing around with Barnes & Noble displays might sell a few extra copies for your favorite author, but it’s equally likely to piss off the bookstore management.

…pester people to buy the author’s work. It’s one thing to recommend your favorite author to your friends; it’s another thing to irritate the hell out of them by pushing them to read the author’s books when they’re clearly not interested. I purposefully avoided watching Firefly until long after the show was dead and buried, because I kept hearing how much I should be watching it. You certainly don’t want to push people away from your favorite authors like that.

…worry if you didn’t buy the book through the author’s Amazon link. You’re probably aware that authors get extra commission from Amazon if you buy their book through the specially crafted link on their site. And considering that authors only get a relatively small percentage of every sale after the money is sliced up among publishers and agents, that commission can double an author’s profit. But guess what? It’s one sale, and the dirty little secret of the publishing industry is that Amazon sales are generally not a very big percentage of an author’s total. So click the link if you remember, but don’t sweat it if you forget it.

…special order copies of the author’s books and then not purchase them. Guess what? Those five copies you special ordered from Borders and never picked up? The manager didn’t shrug her shoulders after you failed to purchase the books and then shelve them in a special display at the front of the store. She sent them straight back to the publisher, and the publisher docked those sales off the author’s royalty statement.

…try to sabotage other authors. This isn’t a winner-take-all game. You can promote the good things about your author without writing nasty anonymous Amazon reviews about the other guy.

* * *

Okay… so, what am I missing?

* * *

(Apologies to the 2005 picketers of the Kenosha, Wisconsin school board, who have fallen victim to my mad Photoshop skillz above. No apologies to the raging douchebags in the second photo, who get their kicks out of telling gay people that they’re going to Hell. Be thankful I didn’t Photoshop something much nastier in there.)

I’ve made no secret about the fact that I’m a big fan of LibraryThing. I’ve spent hours and hours tweaking my LibraryThing profile, adding books to my catalog, and just browsing around other people’s shelves. I’ve spoken with Tim Spalding, LibraryThing’s founder, and he’s taken the time to respond to e-mails of mine and feature me on the LibraryThing blog once or twice.

So I felt a little like a cheating spouse when I responded to someone’s invitation to sign up for a Shelfari account last week. But it was actually much easier than cheating on a spouse, because I didn’t have to go through that whole tedious seduction and getting-to-know-you routine. I exported my whole LibraryThing catalog in about three clicks, and imported it right into Shelfari. In a way, it was like moving in with your mistress and skipping straight to the seven-year-itch all in one shot.

Here are screen captures of my catalog on LibraryThing and Shelfari, side by side. (Visit my shelf on Shelfari.)

After noodling around with Shelfari a little bit, here’s a synopsis of my thought process:

1. The name “Shelfari” is incredibly lame.
2. Shelfari looks slicker than LibraryThing.
3. Shelfari is more user-friendly than LibraryThing.
4. LibraryThing is fairly slick and user-friendly in the first place.
5. So why would I switch to Shelfari?

The big difference between LibraryThing and Shelfari is that LibraryThing caps its free accounts at 200 books; Shelfari doesn’t appear to have any limits. But keep in mind that the LibraryThing rates are eminently reasonable. $10 a year for all you can catalog, or $25 for a lifetime membership.

Oh yeah, and Shelfari has a Facebook application. (I see that LibraryThing is testing out MySpace and LiveJournal widgets, which is cool, but IMHO they need to get cranking on a Facebook app.)

But there’s a huge amount of functionality that LT has which Shelfari doesn’t seem to have. I went browsing through “my shelf” on Shelfari and discovered that my copy of Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends doesn’t have Silverstein listed as the author, only as the illustrator; and despite the fact that there’s an “Edit” link next to Edition Details, there doesn’t seem to be any way to edit that information. I was able to change editions to one which does have the author listed… but this one doesn’t have an illustrator listed. LT, by contrast, lets you edit book details to your heart’s content and upload custom covers that the whole community can use. Does the system think that “J.D. Salinger” and “JD Salinger” are two different people? Easy enough to fix that in LibraryThing.

This community focus is one of the things that makes LibraryThing so appealing. It’s kind of like — well, a library. It’s really, really easy to import and export your entire catalog so you can use it in other applications. Put it on your blog? Tie it in to your Firefox? Access it from your cell phone? No problem! If there are inaccuracies in the catalog, everybody pitches in to help fix it. If you read through the help menus and fine print, you’ll see quirky little bits of humor that give the site some attitude. “If the buzz page doesn’t convince you,” says a little blurb on the LibraryThing home page, “you cannot be convinced. Go away.” There’s a lack of commercial focus that’s very reminiscent of that library feeling. Come on in! Put your feet up, hang around as long as you like, buy some of the books on the Community Used Book table in the back if you’d like, but no pressure.

Of course, there are downsides to the public library. LibraryThing seems to go down more often than most other Web 2.0 sites I’ve seen (except for the chronically hapless MySpace). It’s not uncommon to find bugs and layout quirks. Every once in a while, you’ll find something not working with a cheerful little “we’re working to fix things” message. Oops, the plumbing’s leaking over in the corner again! Don’t worry, we’ve called the guy to fix it, he should be here in the next hour or two. Just try to steer clear of it in the meantime, ‘mkay?

Shelfari, by contrast, feels more like a corporate-owned bookstore. Like something a bunch of guys from Microsoft and RealNetworks would put together and then get funding from Amazon for. And if you poke around in the About Us sections of Shelfari for a few minutes, you’ll see that that’s exactly the case. If you’re wondering why Cory Doctorow breaks into hives whenever you say the word “Shelfari”, it’s because the president and co-founder of the company was in charge of DRM for RealNetworks. (Read Shelfari’s Management page.)

Poking around in the About Us sections of Shelfari reveals that these folks expect to sustain this site through Amazon referral fees, which seems pretty unrealistic to me. If you dig around the LibraryThing site, you’ll see several ironic references to the wads and wads of cash they pull in from Amazon referral fees. Meaning “we don’t expect to set the NASDAQ ablaze with this kind of revenue stream.” True, LibraryThing doesn’t exactly push people to buy books off of Amazon — they cheerfully funnel people to any number of sites, including book swapping sites like BookMooch and ReadItSwapIt — but they’ve got a much larger user base than Shelfari at the moment. Shelfari claims that they’re not going to accept advertising either.

So let’s do the math here: no membership fees + no advertising revenue + minuscule referral fee income – hosting fees, bandwidth fees, programming costs, overhead and salaries = remind me again how you intend to stay afloat after the Amazon money dries up?

For the moment it’s pretty clear which service gets my vote as the more functional, useful, and friendly place to be. Luckily, there’s no reason why I can’t maintain accounts on both for the moment. It’ll be interesting to see how Shelfari grows and develops over time.

The common assumption among programming types about MySpace is that the system started off as somebody’s pet project and quickly mushroomed beyond the programmers’ control. Rather than cooling off growth to create a better infrastructure, the MySpace folks opted for growth at any costs. As a result, we end up with the buggy, unreliable usability nightmare that is MySpace today. Now, it’s assumed, the programmers and sysadmins are scrambling to play catchup.

This article pretty much confirms these assumptions. According to the article, MySpace started out as a ColdFusion-based project — and while ColdFusion is ridiculously easy to program, any developer can tell you it’s got a reputation (deserved or not) for being a little slow and resource-heavy on the performance scale. So as they’ve grown, MySpace has been moving to Microsoft’s ASP.Net and relying on emulators to port some of the older code over.

One can’t really blame MySpace for such logic. It’s the kind of hot-air logic that propelled companies like Pets.com to the stratosphere back in the ’90s and made a ton of people oodles and oodles of cash. It’s Web 1.0 thinking. Using such Web 1.0 thinking, MySpace has quickly vaulted to become the most visited site on the Internet and gotten snatched up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in the process.

But as a result, they’ve built on an unsustainable foundation. They’ve made the classic gamble that short-term gain will trump long-term stability. And like so many Web 1.0 companies that came before them, MySpace is headed for a big, clumsy fall. Here’s why.

• Easy come, easy go. The base audience for MySpace consists of teenagers and folks in their twenties. That’s not to say this is the only demographic using MySpace, but that’s the core audience. These people flocked to the service for the same reasons young people flock to anything: it was new, it was cool, it was free, and everyone they knew was doing it. Give them an alternative that’s newer, cooler, better functioning, and more reliable — not to mention backed by big corporate dollars — and they’ll flock there just as quickly.
• Insecurity. Recently someone came up with the grand idea of distributing malicious code through a security vulnerability in embedded QuickTime videos. Folks have been taking advantage of CSS and HTML quirks to hack MySpace almost since the place began. More and more people are complaining about hacked profiles and hijacked identities. MySpace has demonstrated time and again that they’re behind the curve when it comes to security. So I think it’s highly likely that at some point in the near future, we’ll see a series of successful crippling attacks on MySpace that will send people running in a panicky exodus.
• Slowing pace of innovation. Adapt or die, that’s the unofficial motto of the Internet. And unlike, say, Google, which continues to pump out features and applications by the gallon, MySpace has remained largely sedentary for the past year. They released a lamentable, old-school IM client and better video integration, but otherwise the system is pretty much the same as it was 18 months ago. As MySpace’s technical problems grow and their folks spend more and more time just keeping up with demand, they’re going to fall even further behind.
• Facebook. If you want to see an example of a MySpace-like program that actually works, look no further than Facebook. It’s user-friendly, it’s popular, and best of all, it’s reliable. The service’s big handicap at this point is that it doesn’t allow nearly the level of customization that MySpace does. But that’s only one major partnership with Yahoo! away (assuming Yahoo! finally bites the bullet and makes a deal with them already).
• Where are the premium services? I’m not entirely familiar with the intricacies of MySpace’s business model, but from the looks of things, they’re entirely dependent on advertising. And as Yahoo! has discovered, that’s not a stable strategy for the long term. Why hasn’t MySpace tapped into the burgeoning third-party market of MySpace website pimpers and added services like that of their own? Where are the premium clubs and the premium band promotion services?
• “Why change?” attitude. A former MySpace VP of operations is quoted in the article as saying: “when you look at the result, it’s hard to argue that what we did with the interface and navigation was bad. And why change it, when you have success?” Few technology companies have succeeded in the long run with the mantra “why change?” It won’t fly on the Internet, where the barriers to migrating to another free service are absolutely nil.

So there you have a few reasons off the top of my head why I think MySpace is headed for a fall. This doesn’t mean that they’ll disappear entirely. After all, Compuserve is still around, and America Online will probably hang on for awhile too even after they’ve recklessly thrown away their customers. But neither are any more than a shell of their former selves, and I suspect that MySpace will eventually meet that fate too.

Is it inevitable? Well, every Goliath falls eventually. That’s just the nature of the universe. But it’s up to MySpace just how far away and how graceful that fall is.

—

(Related reading: see my previous rants on Why Does MySpace Suck So Badly? and MySpace Spam or Clever Marketing?)

StumbleUpon installs a toolbar in your browser that allows you to give instant thumbs-up or thumbs-down ratings for the websites you’re viewing. You can also tag them, comment on them, and recommend them to others. Click on a button while you’re browsing and you’ll find a page of user reviews for the site you’re on.

A year ago, I might have been really excited about this. StumbleUpon seems like a perfectly nice and well-implemented service. Instead, I’m suddenly feeling jaded. There’s just too much web 2.0 gimmickry around and I’m starting to get that bursting-bubble feeling.

I have a Reddit account. I regularly use Technorati. I run a WordPress blog with plenty of plug-ins to allow cross-posting, related posting, and comment previewing. I have a Firefox extension called coComment that allows me to track any blog conversation I want. I maintain a MySpace page, a LinkedIn profile, a LiveJournal, and an Amazon blog. My library is on LibraryThing. I sync my browser settings with Google BrowserSync, read e-mail on both GMail and Yahoo!, and read the news on customizable Google News pages. I read RSS feeds in Sage, Bloglines, and IE7. I have instant messaging accounts on Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Google Talk, along with a Trillian client to run them all.

Where does it all end? I could sign up for Digg and del.icio.us and Blogger and Friendster and…

Every single one of these services has a few things in common: they’re all meta information tools. They don’t actually, you know, do much of anything. They’re the Wonder bread that’s supposed to be sandwiching the meat of my online experience. They simply allow me to noodle around with my information in interesting and novel ways, to disseminate it far and wide, to share it and crunch it and squeeze it and caress it. Or they point me to other information that someone else has shared, crunched, etc.

But here’s something else that I’ve noticed: all of their revenue streams are somewhat suspect. Google, Yahoo, and MySpace might have big market capitalizations and lots of dough in the bank, but in the end they’re funded mostly by advertising. Many of these other services are even a step removed from that, and depend on Google’s advertising.

What’s wrong with advertising? Nothing. Except that me and hundreds of thousands of others run ad blocking software (I choose the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox along with Filterset.G) that wipes all of those ads off the screen without a trace. Except that there are morons who perpetrate click fraud on their competitors’ search engine ads with no remorse and (generally) no repercussions. Except that for all of this money that keyword-targeted advertising is supposedly making for so many people, I very rarely actually click on any of it.

Many of these companies have other services that they’re trying to charge money for, but I don’t know how much success they’re having. Google and Yahoo have a whole host of additional services ripe for premium, paying versions, but I don’t think any of them are actually setting the world on fire. StumbleUpon, quite amusingly, tries to convince me to buy “accelerated distribution” of my website whenever I click on a StumbleUpon referring link in my web stats package. But are people buying?

So we’ve got a) four zillion start-ups that b) don’t charge a penny for their services, and c) stay afloat through shaky advertising revenue. Sound familiar?

Now, don’t get me wrong — I like a lot of these services. I’ve blogged before about my adoration for LibraryThing, for instance. I’ve found many an interesting (or at least diverting) website through Digg and Reddit. And StumbleUpon seems like a perfectly good idea, executed in a perfectly good way, available from a perfectly good website. (Let’s also keep in mind that I’m being unfair by lumping an open source project like WordPress in with the rest of these for-profit companies.)

And of course, none of these companies (with the possible exception of Google) indulges in the kinds of gross financial negligence that the dot-coms of the ’90s did. I’m sure the guys who run Digg are doing very nicely for themselves, but I doubt that every lowly coder in the place is getting a six-figure signing bonus and company BMW. I’ve talked with Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing, in the past, and while their membership is growing like crazy, Tim hasn’t exactly started shellacking bundles of money and using them as office furniture.

And yet…

I’m starting to get that same feeling all over again. You know, the feeling you got when that twenty-pound bag of dog food from Pets.com arrived on your doorstep in 1998 for some ridiculously low price with free shipping, and you looked at your spouse and said, “This is just too good to be true.”

It was. And maybe, just maybe, it still is.

MySpace is far and away the most popular of these types of services. According to Alexa, MySpace ranks only below Yahoo and Google in terms of popularity on the web. If you’re curious, you can view my page at http://www.myspace.com/davidlouisedelman.

Here’s the problem: MySpace is an abomination. Nothing works. The things that do work are poorly designed and shoddily implemented. Here’s just a small sampling of problems I’ve been having:

• Member search doesn’t work. Try searching for members using multiple criteria, and watch the search go splat. (Then again, Yahoo’s member search has been broken for years and nobody seems eager to fix it.)
• Importing contacts doesn’t work. I tried importing my online address books from Yahoo, GMail, and AIM. MySpace said it sent out a dozen or so invites. It didn’t, and I had to redo the whole thing by hand.
• Instant messaging doesn’t didn’t work. I tried sending a friend a message just to see what it would do, only to receive a very unprofessional-looking error message stating that the instant messaging was out of commission.
• Cross-posting from WordPress doesn’t work. I have managed to get this working with LiveJournal (http://david-l-edelman.livejournal.com if you’re curious) using a nice little plugin I found on the web. There used to be one of these for MySpace, but the plugin developer gave up because MySpace kept mucking with the API.
• Reporting spam doesn’t work. This morning I received friend requests from kinkymonica, flirtymonica, and luvymonica. How do you report these friend requests as the porn spam they so obviously are? You can’t.
• Approving your friends doesn’t work. I’m currently staring at my “approve/deny your friends” queue, which states that I’m looking at “Listing 1-6 of 6.” Only about an inch away, however, there’s another column that says “1 of 1.” And below, there’s nothing listed. Do I have five phantom friends? (Actually, that would explain a lot of things…)

To add to the functional problems, the site is full of the worst kind of design heresy. Boxes float around the page with seemingly no rhyme or reason. The default icons look like rejects from your old Windows 3.1 installation. Navigation seems to float around the screen in illogical places, to the point where the only button I can rely on is the browser’s Back button. Things get even worse when users start mucking with their MySpace designs and adding polls and plug-ins and garish animated GIFs. You get stuck with endless pages that take forever to load and are impossible to read.

The worst sin of all is that MySpace plays multimedia files without asking you first. My first reaction to any page that starts blaring music or video at me is to immediately click the Back button and run like hell. In order to turn off the music at MySpace, you need to quickly scan the screen for the multimedia player — which is in a different place on each page — and click the Stop or Pause button. But even then, your preference doesn’t stick, so if you go to a different site and come back later, the music starts blaring again. (Only this time it starts playing faster because the page is in your browser cache.)

Recently MySpace attempted to ameliorate this by adding a preference you can set to turn off the automatic music. Surprise: it doesn’t always work.

The question that I have is that why hasn’t MySpace made full use of open standards, the most successful example of social networking on the web to date? Take a look at the source code for your MySpace page, and it’s a mess. No DTD at the top, style sheet links embedded in the middle of the body, tables mixed with DIVs mixed with IFRAMEs willy-nilly.

And I’m not just talking about open standards determined by some committee in Switzerland, but web design standards that have won the long, hard Darwinian slog in the marketplace. Navigational sidebars. Underlined links. Fluid layouts that don’t break on different screen resolutions. Different colors for visited links.

The popularity of MySpace is enough for me to reevaluate all of the design credos I hold so dear. If such a horrible website as this can become a cultural phenomenon and literally change the way American teenagers live their lives, then what hope is there for web standards?

My only consolation is that the Firefox AdBlock extension works just fine on MySpace. Not only that, but Userscripts.org has a bevvy of useful Greasemonkey scripts to turn bad MySpace pages into — well, less bad MySpace pages.

So imagine my excitement when I discovered LibraryThing.

LibraryThing is basically a connected online database of your library. Search the database for books you own and add them to your digital library. Rate them, review them, tag them, comment on them, choose the cover and edition you own. See who else owns them, see what books other people who own them like. Track a user’s recent purchases or reviews with an RSS feed. (If you’re curious, you can view my profile or view my catalog.)

You might be thinking that Amazon already has some of these features. Yes it does, but that doesn’t make LibraryThing redundant. It seems to me that LibraryThing holds about the same relation to Amazon that a brick-and-mortar library holds to your local brick-and-mortar bookstore. Amazon tries to get you to pad your shopping cart at every turn by pointing out related items, add-ons, and discounts; LibraryThing is more concerned with building a book community where people with similar tastes can connect.

That doesn’t mean that LibraryThing is a non-profit. Clicking on book covers does take you to Amazon, and I presume that they get a cut of the sales in return. And the free cataloging of books only extends to the first 200 titles; to catalog an unlimited number of books, you need to pay $10 a year or $25 for a lifetime. LibraryThing just doesn’t shove the commercial upgrades in your face like Amazon does.

This lack of commercial pushiness may be LibraryThing’s best feature. As a result, the interface is clean, easy to navigate, and doesn’t clutter your browser with pop-up windows or ads.

You’re just left with… book-geekity fun. It’s like snooping through thousands of people’s libraries all at once.

The contents of a person’s library tells you a lot about the person herself. Does she own a lot of weighty contemporary literature? Escapist adventure novels? Tomes on politics and economics? A little of each? What would you do if you spotted Chapterhouse: Dune, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and Clown Skits for Everyone sitting side by side on her shelves? (You could do what I did. Reader, I married her.)

More than that, the disposition of a person’s library tells you a lot about the character of the person herself. If you were to look at my library, for instance, you would see that many hardcovers are snugly encased in clear plastic Brodart covers, and there is nary a creased spine or a dogeared page to be found. I go out of my way to buy matched sets of books. You would conclude that I’m an anal retentive son of a bitch, and you’d be right.

I keep all my titles segregated by subject (science fiction, general fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc.) and alphabetized by author. Each author’s works are sorted chronologically, with the occasional exception for numbered series. (Though may God have mercy on your soul if you suggest to me that The Magician’s Nephew is the first book in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series instead of the sixth.)

LibraryThing lets book geeks like me fully engage their OCD tendencies, which is reason enough to buy in. Now I can sort, organize, catalog, and compare to my heart’s content in a safe online space.

Stop reading and go sign up already so I can start snooping in on your lives too.

(Update: Just before posting this, I discovered that LibraryThing actually plugged my book Infoquake on the official company blog, and listed me as one of 20 initial LibraryThing Authors. Thanks! Hope I can return the favor.)