Online Cataloguing for the Book Enthusiast
Acquiring and Documenting Books Through the Internet
Oct 23, 2009
With most hobbies if you’re able to build up a substantial set, chances are if you decide to stop collecting for any given reason, it’s quite easy to sell this collection on to another avid hobbyist. Book collecting is one of these.
Online Cataloguing of Books
There are some services online that help the collector to sort and catalogue the items they have invested in. For example, an avid book collector that focuses on one particular topic, be it horse books, children's books, sci-fi or whatever your fancy, could make good use of the free online service, LibraryThing.
This online system allows you to set up an account and document all the books in your collection. It gives you access to many online book stores and libraries to search out the exact edition of the book you own. Through search facilities you can enter in the title and author of a particular book and a quick search will provide you with copies over a span of publications.
To choose the particular publication you would like to add to your collection, it’s simply a question of clicking on that particular book. If the book you’re looking for doesn’t generate any results, it’s possible to manually add the book, providing the title, author, publication year, language it’s published in and many other details.
Once there are a few books in your collection, it’s possible to view your online library by author, title or a myriad of other categories. Other people can have access to viewing your catalogue and LibraryThing generates a list of those who have many of the same books in your collection.
This allows the collector to perhaps view someone else's similar array of books and make a note of those in a particular category or by a particular author that they haven’t yet acquired. The writer of this article is addicted to accumulating horse books and you can view this catalogue of nearly 500 books online.
eBay for the Buyer and Seller
The likes of eBay also encourages the hobbyist, having such a section in which to search for items. Whatever it is you desire to add to your collection, chances are you’ll find someone online who is hoping to pass on or sell that particular item or others like it.
There are some particularly enterprising people on eBay who seek out items that are appealing to the hobbyist. Once they have acquired them, they sell, making a small – and sometimes large – profit.
One such example is a person who invests time in searching second hand stores or opportunity shops, collecting books of a particular edition until they have the whole series. Time wise this may cost them but financially they may be able to acquire a series for as little as a few dollars and then sell this online to someone who is eagerly trying to acquire that particular series in it’s entirety.
eBay in this way caters well to the buyer who is able to run searches and watch particular items throughout the duration of their sale and put in a last minute bid to acquire that much needed book to complete a particular series.
Chances are there are many such other sites out there that cater to book hobbyists, providing lists of titles by particular authors, information on now out of print copies that may be acquired second hand and such other information that helps to feed the interest of the acquirer. With today's online services, there's never been a better time to take on a hobby.
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