LibraryThing, you make my heart sing

Yeah, yeah, Amazon is using tags. But Amazon.com is soooo 20th century.

Recently, Seattlest has been seduced by LibraryThing, which does for your book collection what deli.cio.us does for your bookmark collection: show them off. Entering books is ridiculously easy -- use a few title and author keywords or the ISBN and LibraryThing consults Amazon.com and a host of libraries for you.

It's an exhibitionist bibliophile's wet dream. (But for heaven's sake, keep the wetness off of those books!)

At just over 200 books, Seattlest's own library is not all that large -- though we're not through entering all of our books, either. The largest library contains 8110 books.

What's this got to do with Seattle? Hmm. LibraryThing's creator, Tim Spalding, lives in Portland -- Maine. It's an interesting way to search for titles with a local focus. Users have currently tagged 51 books "Seattle," encompassing titles from Murray Morgan's Skid Road to Ellen Forney's I Was Seven in '75. Our own Seattle author tag has not yet taken off -- we're the only person using it -- but we live in hope.

And where else are you going to discover that people who own Pop Surrealism also tend to own Max Horkheimer's Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente?

(Gothamist users have a more impressive resource -- 545 titles are tagged New York books, though that's still a drop in the bucket compared to, say, science fiction.)

Seattleites, the most literate urbanites in the country, should eat LibraryThing up with a spoon.