1) BookFinder
This tool is magical. Are you still searching multiple sites when trying to find the best price for that new book you really, really want? Do you buy a lot of used books? Do you love searching for rare books, first editions, or signed copies? Do you just want to check the price of a book on your favourite book-buying site to make sure you're getting a fair deal? If you answered "Yes" to any of those, or if you just like books, BookFinder is for you.
The really great thing (I think) about BookFinder is that it shows you prices with the shipping included. No more getting really excited about that book that costs $0.01 and then finding out that it costs $7.00 to ship!
2) Goodreads (of course)
I really like Goodreads for two reasons: its great recommendation system, and its reviewers.
Unlike the recommendation systems on several sites I've used, Goodreads doesn't just base your recommendations on the most recent books you've read or marked as "Want to Read." Yes, it takes these things into account, but you can also filter the results by interest and by shelf, narrowing down your recommendations to what you really feel like reading at the time. It seems to me that your recommendations refresh themselves occasionally, adding new books and taking away those in which you've shown little interest, avoiding the pitfall of an ever-growing list of recommendations that you can never fully look through. Plus, they make it really easy to say, "No, thanks," to a recommendation and move on, but you can always go back to your list of books marked "Not interested" and change your mind.
Goodreads reviewers are, overall, an intelligent and well-read group of people who write good, honest, well-supported reviews. It's clear that they read their books carefully and closely and give their reviews some real thought before putting them out on the Web. It's one of the things that Goodreads really values, and they expect a certain level of quality to be maintained by their reviewers.
Click here to pop over to Goodreads!
3) LibraryThing
LibraryThing also has its strong points, and, for me, those are a) its efficient cataloguing system and b) its tagmash feature.
I find LibraryThing cataloguing much easier and faster than trying to enter books on Goodreads. Goodreads is perfectly fine if you're adding books one at a time as you read them, but, if you're just starting and want to catalogue your entire book collection, oh boy, I hope you have time on your hands, because it will bring up a dialogue box asking you to write a review, rate the book, and decide whether or not you want the new book added to your updates feed EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. If somebody finds a way around this, let me know. Luckily, I was on LibraryThing beforehand, and it has a handy-dandy export feature which saved me a heck of a headache. The LT "Add Books" feature is lovely because it is designed to let you add books en masse. Specify the shelf you want the books added on, add tags if you're scanning many books on the same subject, and let your fingers fly over your numpad as you rapid-fire ISBNs into the search box. No navigating to a special page, no dialogue boxes asking you for ratings, just quick and easy addition of books to your collection. If you're like me and use a CueCat barcode scanner (which I highly recommend, especially if you're not scared of breaking it open and "declawing" it so that it works with any site), things go even more quickly. Plus, if your local library is listed in the database, you can choose to get all of your information there, ensuring that your library book and the book in your online collection match.
The tagmash feature is something I haven't encountered anywhere else, and I love it. It's a bit tricky to find at first, but here's what you do: type your desired tags, separated by commas, into the search box at the top-right of the screen. When the results appear, click the "Tags" tab, and you'll see the tagmash option. Click that and let the magic begin. If tagmashing finds books that match some or all of your desired tags, it shows them to you, and you can then take your pick. You can also use a "-" sign to tell LibraryThing what you don't want to read--for example, if you want to read about a boarding school in England but don't want to read about magic, you would ask LT for "boarding school, England, -magic." This demotes "magic" and its related words, so you won't see Harry and his friends at the top of the list. Tagmash is really useful when you know what you want to read but have no idea where you might start looking.
Click here to go to LibraryThing!
4) A CueCat or other barcode scanner
CueCats are cute little bits of hardware that apparently enjoyed a very short period of popularity and were then involved in a big scandal and pretty much disappeared. Today, people still use them for scanning barcodes, especially on LibraryThing. They're little cat-shaped things with a USB cord attached and a red light blinking between their front paws, and you just run them over a bar code to scan it. The only catch is, if they're unmodified, they output gibberish that only certain things, like LibraryThing, can interpret. Your ISBN won't come out as a nice string of numbers. LibraryThing interprets CueCat encoded output with no problems, but, if you want to be able to read barcodes with you CueCat and use them on other sites, there's a quick and simple hardware modification you can do to "declaw" them and make their output readable as a regular string of numbers. It's pretty easy and instructions are readily found, but I won't link to any here, just because you have to make sure the instructions are for your specific model of CueCat, and I don't want to lead anyone to break their cute little cat by using the wrong set of instructions. Really, though, a five-second Google search and a screwdriver is all it takes.
I like my CueCat and find it useful for adding batches of books to my LibraryThing collection, and, since they're pretty cheap, I think it's worth it to get one even if you don't use LibraryThing. Once declawed, they can be used anywhere you can input text, so, whether you're making a home database or using some other cataloguing site, they're useful. I can't vouch for any other barcode scanners, of course, since I don't own one, but they're definitely a useful thing to have if you have any reason to catalogue many books at a time.
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