Library Thing

My wife and I really enjoy books and have an addiction to acquiring them. At time of writing our collection numbers 885 books, a number we’re quite proud of. While we’ll never be able to read every book printed, we can collect the ones of interest to us and enjoy what we can.

We have a quite diverse collection of books and an even distribution of MDS (like Dewey Decimal System) numbers ranging from fiction, to business, to technology, and social sciences.

We use a platform called Library Thing to track our inventory and to help organize our books. It automatically pulls data from book databases, has a mobile app that has a barcode scanner, and has a feature for tracking loaned out books.

You can view our books on our profile and if you want to borrow any of them let us know! Books are for reading, not for holding shelves in place.

Fun Stats

Library Thing also has some fun stats that it automatically generates like:

96.8 Feet Of Books

The application estimates that we have over 96.8 feet of books that weight the equivalent of 56.17 adult badgers. Those 232,731 pages are taller than:

• Michaelangelo’s David
• A Giraffe
• Stonehenge
• Cleopatra’s Needle
• and The Sphinx

If laid end to end, the pages would stretch 115,969 feet.

Heavy Lean Towards Nonfiction

75.6% of our books are nonfiction mainly due my technology and business books and our various textbooks.

Some Unique Books

Having a large userbase, it’s fun to find what we have that’s “rare”, we have:

• 9 books that nobody else has logged a copy of
• 5 books that only one other person has logged a copy of
• 4 books shared with 2 other users
• 6 books shared with 3
• 4 books shared with 4

Most interestingly, someone else has a copy of the Official America Online Tour Guide book.

Future of Library Thing

I don’t see us giving up Library Thing in the near or medium future it’s minimal in lock-in, and gives me something to peruse before wanting to go book shopping. More than once I’ve seen a book on the store shelf, picked it up, then discovered that we have it in our library.

Books Are Telepathy

A quick aside

In Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft¹ he writes about how books are special from other forms of art in their ability to traverse time.

Telepathy, of course. It’s amusing when you stop to think about it—for years people have argued about whether or not such a thing exists, folks like J. B. Rhine have busted their brains trying to create a valid testing process to isolate it, and all the time it’s been right there, lying out in the open like Mr. Poe’s Purloined Letter. All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation. […]

My name is Stephen King. I’m writing the first draft of this part at my desk (the one under the eave) on a snowy morning in December of 1997. […] This book is scheduled to be published in the late summer or early fall of 2000. If that’s how things work out, then you are somewhere downstream on the timeline from me … but you’re quite likely in your own far-seeing place, the one where you go to receive telepathic messages. Not that you have to be there; books are a uniquely portable magic.

The writer of a book (King in this case) had a thought in their brain and via some medium I’m able to hear their thoughts in my head all because of the power of the written word. Not only that but the super power goes even further, this same thought is trivially reproducible and redistributable to more than one person via printing.

Compared to a general idea being shared from person to person, explicit words and phrases are being transferred from one brain to another. The way we read even puts the little voice in our head.

There’s a strange implication here that AI written text is telepathy with AI, but I’ll save that for a future post.