Tuesday 4 January 2011

A Very Booky Xmas - Part 1 - The Cue Cat!!

After a holiday hiatus I thought it was about time I re-entered the blogosphere and what better way to do that than to brag about some of the great gifts I received for Chrissy. To say I had a very booky festive season would be an understatement, so this week you'll be treated to a grand tour of the best of my book related gifts. Todays instalment is all about the Cue Cat pictured in this post.

I've been a member of LibraryThing for over 12 months now. For those of you unfamiliar with the website it's an online community for serious book lovers where you can catalogue and review your books and share your obsession with other bibliophiles. My personal book collection numbers over 500 titles so it was taking me quite some time to even make a dent in cataloguing them on LibraryThing.....until the arrival of the Cue Cat on Christmas Day. This fabulous little tool reads the barcodes of books with one simple swipe back and forth and then automatically populates your catalogue with the stored information about the book. In only a few days I have managed to catalogue over 200 books in my collection. It's only a little thing, but it has really made me smile!! The only fault with the Cue Cat is that there are some bar codes it doesn't recognise, but the majority it does.

I'm hoping to have my entire book collection catalogued within the next month or so and would love to connect with any fellow members of LibraryThing. My profile name is ReadingHabit, so send me a friend request when you get a chance. Stay tuned for more tomorrow - Part 2 - Bath Book Caddy!!

4 comments:

  1. LOL,
    I've been uhming and ahing about one of those book scanners for a while as I'd love to get everything I have sorted in case of fire. (I'd be putting everything into a list that I could upload to an email account, have a copy on a memory stick and also have a hardcopy at someone elses house.

    May seem paranoid but with the levels of books I have in my "library" I'd not be able to replace them.

    Great item and will look for one in the UK.

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  2. I'm in Australia and ordered the Cue Cat from the US, so it's still an option for you. You might even want to take a look at using LibraryThing as your storage facility. You can export all the data you input and it's very reasonably priced (free for the first 200 books, $10/year for more than 200, or a lifetime account for a donation of your choice). You can even make wishlists, which I did for Xmas, then emailed to all my friends and family. And, you can tag books with your own keywords to really personalise your collection. It's worth a look!!

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  3. Oh hey, I think I might have one of those that I never used. I will have to see if I can find it. I use library thing as well & also have never finished updating my books.

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  4. Hey Ginny, What's your name on Library Thing so I can send you through a friend request? Thanks, Amber (Reading Habit).

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