It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
- Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
- Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Banosaur and Alexandra Florence Books.
- Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
- Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
- Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
- If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
- If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
- If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
I use LibraryThing as my online bookish platform of choice. I've put essentially every book I own into my LibraryThing account, separated into a handful of collections that I mostly use to organize the books into loose groupings, mostly based upon whether I have read or reviewed them or not. I use tags to do most of the heavy lifting with respect to sorting my books by genre and topic. I use well over five hundred tags classifying books as being science fiction, fantasy, history, and so on. I also tag whether books have won or been nominated for various awards, and some general topic markers, such as "Mars" for books set on Mars, or "Africa" for books related to Africa in some way.
I also have a Goodreads account, but I almost never use it, and have only entered a tiny fraction of my book collection into it. I can't remember the last time I logged into it.
I also keep an Excel spreadsheet that includes not only the books I own, but the books I am looking to acquire. The primary use of this spreadsheet is so that I avoid buying books that I already own, and remind me of which books I am actively looking for. I also use this spreadsheet as a secondary means of tracking my reading.
As far as my physical books go, much of my collection is currently boxed up and stored in great stacks against the wall in one room of the too-small apartment that I am currently living in. Those books are mostly organized by size, as this makes the boxes that hold them easier to stack.
The portion of my collection that is shelved is organized alphabetically by author, although I arrange all book series together in series order. I separate the hardbacks and trade paperbacks from the mass market paperbacks, but other than that most of my books are stored this way. The two main exceptions are my graphic novels, which I keep separate from my other books, although they too are arranged alphabetically by author, and my collection of role-playing game books, which are kept in their own section, organized in a manner that is probably incomprehensible to anyone but me that could best be called "the order of idiosyncratic usefulness to me when I am working on role-playing game material".
The final group of books that I keep separate from the rest are review copies. I used to try to organize these in a rough order in which I intended to read them, but I gave that up as futile long ago. Now they just get put on the shelf and pulled off in the order of whatever seems like something interesting at the time I am making a selection.
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@Cayt: I have about 9,700 books, which is what makes entering them into Goodreads a time-prohibitive task. I might do it at some point in the future when I want to take on another enormous project, but that's not in the cards just now.
ReplyDeleteI get a lot of my books at library book sales and used book stores. I get some of them at yard sales, but at this point most yard sales don't have very many books that I don't already have. I've had the Excel spreadsheet for quite a few years, and it has grown organically over time from a few hundred entries to the 12,500 or so that are on it now.