allconsuming

[jfb]

I spent some time tonight playing with allconsuming.net, a cool site that could use some critical mass. It's basically a collection of info about books people are talking about. The front page lists books recently mentioned on blogs, as well as the most mentioned books of the last week. Clicking on a book will get you a detail page, with blog excerpts and purchase links. (You can use a LibraryLookup bookmarklet if, like me, you'd rather borrow than buy.)

Once you sign up as a member, there are tools for managing lists of your favorite books, books you're currently reading, books you've finished, etc. You can also compile a list of "friends" (allconsuming will recommend people who are reading the same books you are), and sign up to be notified when they mention new books, and stuff like that.

I was planning to add a "current reading" list to my journal, like Chris has on his, but unfortunately getting it updated from allconsuming requires a script tag, and LiveJournal seems to be silently removing my script tags. I've got an alternate plan, but it'll take me a while to get to it. Meanwhile, if you're wondering, here's my page.

Comments

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I've been meaning for a while to make a list of books (and another for movies watched) I'm in the process of reading, re-reading, or have relatively recently read.

I still haven't found a copy of Persepolis, for some odd reason.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Allconsuming is a reasonably convenient way to do it, although (I should've mentioned) Amazon's search engine was screwed up last night, which we think is why Allconsuming's was too.

tip

[chrismwage.livejournal.com]

If you start using it, Erik pointed out a convenient tip: Searching for books through the actual site, allconsuming.net, sorta sucks. If you just go to an existing book on allconsuming.net, it's a URL that looks like something.cgi?id= .. that number is just an ISBN. You can go to Amazon and find what you want, and substitute the ISBN in and it'll work fine. Comes in handy.. I even added the ISBN for Foreign Affairs, which is a quarterly journal, and it worked just fine.