Elle. I mentioned that Abebooks interviewed me for their new “Avid Collector” newsletter (sign-up / newsletter). I thought I’d add that I was pleased and surprised to discover their Avid Reader Bookclub is doing Elle by Douglas Glover. Glover, a Canadian novelist who won the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction for Elle, was my wife’s favorite writing teacher at Vermont College, and she gives Elle a big thumbs-up.

LibraryThing, PaperbackSwap, loaning and swapping. There’s been a lot of buzz about swap sites recently. Surely not all LibraryThing users would want to swap or loan their books with others, but 30,000 users and 2 million books is a very respectable starting-point for such a community. I approached arguably the top swap site, PaperbackSwap, to see if we could work together somehow. I’m thinking of some easy way to move books between systems, with perhaps some cross-listing or cross functionality; actually getting LibraryThing directly into the business of swapping is a bit daunting. I am, however, somewhat interested to see if an “InterLibraryThingLoan” system could work. Okay, I admit it, I just want to get my hands on that translation of Palaephatus…

I started a discussion about swapping, loaning and PaperbackSwap over on the Google Group. I’d love to hear more opinions, either in comments here, or over there.

Beta-licious. The blog MoMB, The Museum of Modern Betas, published a list of the most popular beta applications by the number of times they’ve been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. LibraryThing comes in number seventeen, in between Google Scholar and Blinklist, and above Frappr, Odeo, Rollyo and other beta royalty. This is particularly good in so far as I’ve never done one of those underhanded, unfair Post to Del.icio.us links. Er, scratch that.

That’s it for now. As many of you know, I’m still largely in crazy mode with my new child. I’ve managed to do some incremental things—eg., the new libraries—during interstices, but substantial work, particularly work requiring my full attention for more than ten minutes is on hold. I hope to get back in the saddle soon. They say the first month is the hardest…

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