For a long time I have been searching for a nice place to keep a list of my books in order to make it available to the public. My intention is that other people like my friends, neighbors and colleagues can go there and see if I own a book that they are looking for. Especially IT books have such a short time to live that it makes sense to look into somebody’s copy instead of buying it.

I thought about implementing such an application by myself, and the latest idea was to create a Rails application that uses ISBNdb and Barcodepedia, perhaps even in a mashup.

Then I found LibraryThing, and for now I think it is decent for what I am using it for. I have no plans to put all my books online, thus the limit of 200 books of a free account will not bother me.

The only open question is how I could store a status on the book, such as who has currently borrowed a book. But maybe the comment section of LibraryThing will server for this, too. Another idea would be to use tags. I will experiment with that over the next few days.

One important aspect that led me to choose LibraryThing was that it allows to export all books I entered – so there is no lock-in of my data.

You can find my (incomplete)  list of books here.