My Library

I have in my house somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 books. Just printed paper books. There are also magazines, books on tape, books on CD and e-books. My books, my wife's books, my daughters books. Children's books from when my daughter was 3. Fiction: sci-fi, fantasy, horror, mystery, historical fiction, romance, suspense/thriller. Nonfiction: How-to, business, biography, current events, politics, history, reference, economics, cookbooks, manuals. John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Anne Rice, Nora Roberts, Laurell K. Hamilton, P. J. O'Rourke, Hunter S. Thompson, Ayn Rand, Morgan Llywellyn, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, George Carlin, Tim Allen. (And those are just the multiple book authors.)

I've never actually counted them, but I know we have 3 large bookhelves and 2 small ones in one room, a couple of shelves in another room, books on tables in every room, books on the counter in the bathroom, books in boxes and books stacked on the floor next to the bed.

At one point I started a project to enter my books in a database to keep track of them, but it wasn't any fun and it crashed my PDA. It was hard poking in the titles of several hundred books one letter at a time with a stylus and no one seemed interested in reading the tiny little letters on the tiny little screen - even me.

So, I started thinking, which is always dangerous. This WordPress thing is at its core a database. Well, at its core it's an interface with a database. But it's easy to type in whatever I want about the books and then search for it later. I can back everything up pretty easily. And I can share it with anyone who might care to know what I've read, what is sitting on a shelf waiting for me to read it again and what I want to read. With WordPress's famous 5-minute installation, it took me less time to set this up, including typing this page than it took to setup the database on that PDA a couple of years ago.

So, currently my intentions are to log a few books a day off the shelves and all my new books as they come in. With the new books I'll be putting the basic information and then updating after I read them. With the old books, I'll be putting my reviews, memories and recollections, possibly amusing anecdotes, excerpts, whatever comes to mind. With all of them I'm going to use the WordPress custom tags to enter ISBNs, Library of Congress card catalog numbers (where available), etc. Those may not all show up immediately because I want to set up the post style so each entry will have a little catalog card and that may take a few days to figure out, but the information will be there just waiting for me to set up the display. The posts should eventually (and maybe initially, I'm not sure until I try it) be searchable by those 'meta' or 'card catalog' items.

I'm also going to include a link to buy the books where possible, it is going to be an affiliate link where possible. If people should actually buy some of the books, perhaps it will pay the hosting bill or even give me a few bucks to go towards my favorite thing....want to guess?

Books.

Anyway, this is a fun project. Feel free to comment.