Love Books and Libraries? If you do, you will enjoy a visit (or two, or more) to Library Thing (http://www.librarything.com). Library Thing is an ingenious website that lets you catalog your own books on the Internet. You can also label them with “tags” that are representative of some aspect of the book, and/or meaningful to you. Once you’ve done that, other users of the website can find books you’ve cataloged based on the “tags” you’ve given them. For example, if you cataloged The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown with the words “art,” “Jesus,” and “Mary,” “conspiracy” and “crime fiction,” anyone searching at Library Thing on any of those words, and especially on all of them, would find the book you had cataloged. In that way, readers can share books they love with other readers with similar interests.

And the fun doesn’t stop there. Once you’ve cataloged a few books, you can then ask Library Thing to show you the collections of other readers with similar tastes on the theory that if you both read a lot of the same books, you will also be interested in other books that person or persons have read that you have not.

Library Thing also lets you rate books on a 1-5 star rating scale, and, if you’re so inclined, write reviews of books you like, or of ones you don’t. And there’s more, but I’ll let you discover the additional features for yourself. Best of all, though, is that you can use all the features of Library Thing, and catalog up to 200 books free. To expand your catalog beyond 200 books will cost you anywhere from $6.00 to $20.00 a year. You decide how much you’re willing to pay. $10.00/per year is the recommended fee, and, of course, they’ll gladly accept more than $20.00/per year if you’re inclined to pay more.

Highly recommended by librarians and book lovers everywhere. Check it out.