Ain't technology grand!

My eyes are blurry, my back aches, my good ear is howling and my deaf one has little bells twinkling. I've spent the last two nights putting many of my books on a site owned by Amazon called Shelfari. If you're a book nut you will love this site as it allows you to catalog all of your books. Whoa... before you start to snooze, hear me out... I'm not talking about the Dewey Decimal System... I mean catalog with pictures of the actual volume you own on a virtual shelf. In addition, you can rate each book with a star rating of 1 to 5 and you can indicate your favorites with a little heart that appears on the corner of the book jacket! My guess is that when Jefferson was preparing to sell six thousand volumes from his personal library to the government to kick start the Library of Congress, he would have been delighted to have a system like this.

Of course, like most sites today there are a whole host of review and discussion groups you can join if that's your bag. Personally I don't like this social networking stuff very much partly because I type very slowly with two fingers and my spelling is atrocious (thank God for spell check otherwise that atrocious bit would have been unrecognizable, hmmm... as would unrecognizable come to think of it).

It's really amazing. All you do is type in the title of the book and up pops all the various jackets that have adorned the book over its lifetime. You simply select the one that matches what's in your real library and... voila... it appears on your virtual shelf. (If you're interested in starting your own Library just click on the word SHELFARI at the top of my list for more info).

In addition, there's a widget that allows you to post books on your blog! Take a look at the right side of this post and just below the blurb with my picture you should see John's Library. I have yet to figure out how to put the books in any particular order, so for now they are just random. The cool thing is if you see something that interests you, you can click on it and it will take you to a page that has a synopsis in addition to pictures of all the jackets.

If you don't see the Library on your screen, you probably need to refresh your page. Go up to your menu and under VIEW you'll find REFRESH or RELOAD (at least this is how it works on Firefox) click on that and your computer will dump its memory of the page and download a new one, which should have the Library. If you have a problem with this please put a note in the comments box below.

In some cases, Amazon does not have a jacket picture so the book is shown with a blank cover. Finally at the very bottom of the list is a NEXT link that will bring up a completely new list... if you're really bored, you can review all 400 or so volumes I've posted so far!