Unfortunately, for me it isn’t working…I have no clue if it’s ’cause I use linux or why, but I’m getting an error, both on my blog and on the preview on their site, so…I think I’m gonna end up deleting it from my sidebar soon.

Vox – Thanks! Great stuff to consider there, especially the thoughts around data entry and social.

And…as I started writing about how slow Shelfari was, I decided to check so I could time the thing in approximation…and it’s now working lightening fast. They still break the search results in multiple pages, which pisses me off (I have google configurated to give me 100 results per page…I still haven’t found if I can do that in Shelfari), but at least it’s AJAXy and you can just click a book to add it and then click the next one…*that* is how it should be done.

I still doubt I’ll ever add my 3000 books, or my 25000 ebooks…but…my major books and anything new I acquire? I believe I will. Well…I will, as soon as I find the “export list in a decent format” option…adding a bunch of books for the site to go under and me lose the info? no, thanks…I rather go the tellico way instead. (tellingo is a linux program for catalogs of anything you can think off…it’s well made, too, but it lacks the social component…and books *have* to be a social thing, even if you read them on your own…books are all about sharing, from the author to the readers, from the readers to the author and among the readers)

So…maybe, just maybe, Shelfari is the site I need to finally catalog all my books…or at least the ones I buy from now on…maybe.

As an example, LibraryThing, you do a search for an author (John Ringo, in my test). I got 99 results back from Amazon….good. I select one to add…and it takes me out of the selection screen and to the “recently added” thing…and I have to do the search *again* to see the list.

Not happy with that, it splits the 99 results in several pages…so…once I added all the books in the first page, I had to hit NEXT in the search results *before* I could add any other books.

IMNSHO, that’s *bad* UI design. What would be the right way? You get the list of results, all of them together in a single page…with checkboxes next to each item…and an “Add to my library” button at the bottom. Simple, fast, easy…and I haven’t found *one single site* that does this.

All the sites seem to have been created with “I read a book this year” in mind, instead of “I read 8 books this week” or “I have a seriously sized library that I’d love to catalog”. Yes, I know people like me are rare…but…come on! It’s not rocket science!

So…I remain without catalog.

Oh, and 3000 books? It’s a lowball estimate of the number of paper books in my library…my ebooks library hit 25,000 (yes, twenty five thousand) books a few months ago…there’s no way in heaven or hell that I’d be able to add my paper library to one of these things, much less my electronic one, which is the one that’s still growing (I stopped buying paper books 3 or 4 years ago…I buy electronic now, exclusively).

You might also want to check out http://www.LibraryThing.com, an older, more popular and–in my biased opinion–rather better site.

Shelfari does have nice widgets though