It’s interesting how we don’t seem to become immersed in finding a solution to a problem until we’ve fully experienced it ourselves, that’s what happened to me this weekend. I was looking for a way to display all the books I’m currently reading using a widget on my blog, some treasure hunting in Google later, I discovered LibraryThing.

Signing up is a no-brainer and requires no e-mail verification. Once logged in, you can begin adding books. All you need to do is search, add any tags you like and voila! If that’s not good enough you can always use the advanced search option or add books using ISBN for later modification. The books you select will then appear in your library and for which the views are customizable. Somebody tell me that’s not magic.

Now this is the interesting bit, by clicking on a book and selecting from the menu “social” will take you to another page with information compiled by other people such as reviews and ratings. You can even publish your own and have a discussion. Another feature is that information is retrieved from Amazon’s database, which means you have access to a somewhat “official” review and synopsis.

Really slick in my opinion. Did I mention that you can scan in your books using a barcode reader?