my recent reads..

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters; From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima
Power Sources and Supplies: World Class Designs
Red Storm Rising
Locked On
Analog Circuits Cookbook
The Teeth Of The Tiger
Sharpe's Gold
Without Remorse
Practical Oscillator Handbook
Red Rabbit

Monday, June 16, 2008

bookjetty - a great new site to track, share, buy and borrow books

I've fallen in love with bookjetty, a great new site for books by Herryanto Siatono.

Although my It's a Prata Life blog is officially dedicated to prata (and always will be!), I also use it to keep a diary of the books I'm reading. I probably always will, but I do make sure to try out all the "book tracking" sites, facebook apps and so on that I come across.

None have really jiggled my worm until I discovered bookjetty.

The killer feature for me is the great library integration on the site. It helps answer all the usual questions I have whenever I hear about a new book..

  • Have I already got it or read it before?

  • Does one of my friends have it? Maybe I can borrow it..

  • Can I get it from the local library?

  • Can I buy it online?

  • (oh, and if the last two steps fail, I may actually visit a real bookstore!)

The library catalogue checks work a treat - right within your booklist. I used this feature yesterday as I knew I would be heading to the library. Within 5 minutes on bookjetty I had added a few books I'd been interested in reading and found out that 3 of them were available and on the shelf at my local library. An hour later, I had them checked out.

The bookjetty developer(s?) have done a great job of integrating the libraries, especially considering that most are still running archaic web 0.1 systems which are not very mashup friendly. I've posted before about a kludge to do library lookups from an amazon page, but it never works very reliably because of the dumb library catalogue it needs to talk to, so I can appreciate some of the challenges they may have had.

And here's an example of how the library checks appear...


If you are into books, I heartily recommend you go and register at bookjetty and check it out!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow, this is such a great find! thanks hon for the excellent intro. Now i am so completely dependent on this portal to keep track of the ever growing "wanted" list.. christmas coming.. hint hint ;)