More Bibliophiliac Detritus

In a post a few days ago, I talked about BookRabbit.com — a (fairly new) site which lets readers share the titles of books they own, in hopes of discovering other books they might be interested in. The clever mechanism which BookRabbit have come up with for communicating this information is bookshelf photographs: take a photo of a bookshelf, and go through every (or at least many) of the books displayed thereon, “tagging” them by title, edition, and so on.

I found this impossible to resist.

Above is the first photo I submitted. Books which I’ve “tagged” show with either blue or yellow outlines. The default is blue; as a visitor to your shelf scrolls his/her mouse cursor over a tagged book, the outline of that book shows as yellow.

Highlighted above is the book Wicked Words, by Hugh Rawson (subtitled, deliciously, A Treasury of Curses, Insults, Put-Downs, and Other Formerly Unprintable Terms from Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present). (Mine is a different edition than the one shown at the Amazon site — which may matter, as I’ll explain shortly.)

There are some anomalies to the site, but I think they’re primarily attributable to its, well, newness.

First is the idea that you’re not just identifying your book by title and/or author; you’re identifying it by specific edition as well: a specific publication year, specific cover, ISBN, and so on. I guess the idea is that editions are sometimes different enough that they can be considered almost different books. Which is inarguable. It’s also inarguable, though, that when I say (in everyday usage) “I’ve got Catch-22 on my bookshelf,” I don’t mean the paperback Dell edition, the 19th printing, May 1967, ISBN (whatever) — as opposed to the 18th or 17th printings, or even a first edition. All I mean to say is: “I’ve read and have a copy of Catch-22.” Splitting hairs so finely quite possible means that the BookRabbit matching algorithms won’t “find” someone with the same book… simply because the ISBN (or whatever) is different.

(On the other hand, referencing specific editions does, presumably, make it easier for BookRabbit — which is also in the business of selling books — pinpoint which edition to offer to a potential purchaser. And it’s also true that I have no idea how the “BookRabbit matching algorithms” actually work.)

Another strange little thing to prepare yourself for: BookRabbit’s database really cannot (yet) be expected to include all books published — certainly not within the last 50 years, and certainly not when you factor in all the different editions, and UK vs. USA editions, and so on. I’ve got many books by H. Allen Smith, for instance; BookRabbit knows nothing of them. In such cases you can simply create a new database record for the unknown title, whoops, edition, using an online Web form; thereafter, the book will be in the database for the next person’s use, too. But it does slow down the process of tagging your shelves (at least, if you too have a good number of offbeat books in your library).

Finally — and this will not matter to a lot of you, but it does to me (and some of the rest of you :) — the interactive BookRabbit bookshelves are depicted not in plain-old photographs, but as Shockwave “objects” on the Web page. This means that as long as your Web browser and operating system support Shockwave, you’ll do just fine. It also means that if you’re using any browser at all in the Linux operating system, you are SOL. So… I can edit my BookRabbit bookshelves, and view those of others, only when in Windows. Grrrrrrr.

For the record (and the non-Linuxites), the two shelves I’ve done so far are here and here.