WSJ reporter Aaron Rutkoff discovers LibraryThing.com, a website that’s like filesharing for your book collection…except that you can’t really share the actual books online, just the knowledge that you own them. So in that sense it’s kinda like a bibliophile’s MySpace…except that you can get algorithmically-derived reading recommendations based on your holdings, especially when you use category tagging to develop an increasingly granular description of your books’ subject matter.
Another way the site isn’t like MySpace: “The object,” Rutkoff observes, “is always to find more books, not to kindle online relationships or cliques.” Creator Tim Spalding has parlayed the site into an investment from Abebooks.com, which counts among its initial plans an intense round of data mining which should, says one exec, speed along the transformation of bookselling into “a demand-driven business.”