I’m trying to use the LibraryThing import feature. It’s supposed to pick out the ISBNs from a file and then automatically add them to my list. There’s a queue though. The first time I tried, it said there were just over 330 books ahead of me on the queue, and that it would get to mine in an hour or so. That was yesterday. After about 4 hours, it was still saying it would take about an hour to get to mine. Today, I checked again and it wasn’t any further. I thought, “Maybe it’s because I told it to take the information from Amazon.” So I cleared my queue, uploaded the same file again, and asked to take the book information from Boston University. Now it says I’ll have to wait 4 hours, that there’s over 2,000 books ahead of me in the queue. I guess I’ll peek back next week. If mass entering doesn’t work, then it might be too tiresome to enter the 7,500 items I have.

Another issue is that even if the catalog were up on LibraryThing, patrons wouldn’t be able to tell if the book is available yet. They’d have to contact me and ask. If I have time later, I will check out aNobii. Apparently, they have a some kind of feature that manages circulation. It’s meant to be for private libraries, for example, in case you can’t remember who has your personal copy of Iceberg Slim’s “Pimp,” and another friend wants to borrow your equally treasured copy of Donald Goines’ “Dopefiend,” you can keep track of that in aNobii, even get the website to automatically send reminders to your friend after a few weeks. At least that’s what they say. I haven’t tried it yet. Sounds pretty hot, though.

By the way, Amazon is virulently anti-union. If you’re in the USA, do your online book purchases from Powells. Guess I’d better add some kind of disclaimer about whose opinions this blog reflects blah blah in my “about” page.