Update: LibraryThing mastermind Tim has finished integrating BookMooch (and a few other book-swapping sites) into LibraryThing. Yay! Finally I can try to put my Java book to good use! Read the announcement on the LibraryThing blog.

BookMooch, another service focusing on books was recently released. While one of my most favourite Web2.0 ventures, LibraryThing, is focusing primarily on the theoretical aspect of a social web for book lovers, namely being able to compare ones collection to others, write reviews, etc., BookMooch is actually going one step further:

Their slogan “New Life for Old Books” very much summarises what the service is about. Swap your old books for other people’s old books. The idea is simple, and so is the implementation. When you sign up, BookMooch makes you enter 10 book you’d like to have, then you can enter books you would like to swap with others. To fill your list of the 10 desired books, you can also import your Amazon wishlist, which is a nice idea. The whole thing is managed by a points system, so people don’t start mooching books off of others without sending some out themselves.

The service is a very good idea for people with limited budgets, or people with limited space. The only thing that’s missing now is a reciprocal API to LibraryThing.

PS: I just saw that they are actually linking to the LibraryThing entries of the books! Nice! Now let me synchronize the two services, and I’m one happy book lover!

Well, since everyone and their Grandma are pushing towards content on mobile phones, it doesn’t exactly come as a surprise that LibraryThing, everybody’s favourite online library and cataloguing service, can now be accessed via mobile phone too.

From their blog entry:

The idea is simple—you get the most important features of LibraryThing through your cell phone’s “internet” feature. So you can check whether you have something—by title, author, tag or ISBN—when you’re in the bookshop, browse your catalog, and read your reviews. You can even accesss your “Pssst!” recommendations. But I don’t know anything about cellphone security, so you can’t add items, and you can’t look at private libraries—even your own.

This is great news really. It’s not that I love working with screens as tiny as my mobile’s, but I was wishing for something like that a while ago while standing in a bookstore, and undecided whether my girlfriend actually had a certain book. Well, now it’s as easy as whipping out my mobile and punching in http://librarything.com/m/.

LT founder Tim Spalding even set up a test page, so you don’t have to get out your mobile to see what all the fuss is about:

Great stuff!