« Yahoo!'s BBAuth: Browser Based Authentication | Main | John Furrier and Rock Mountain Voices »
GuruLib Not Hitting on All Cylinders
 GuruLib Screenshot (click to enlarge) |
I don’t often put things on my blog that people send me unsolicited, but occasionally it’s relevant—or just catches my interest. Not long ago, I got a note about something called GuruLib, an online system for keeping track of your books. A while back I reviewed Delicious Library, an OS X app that I use to manage my library.
As you can see from this public library from the creators, GuruLib uses the same “wood grain paneling” mode as Delicious Library, but don’t hold that against it—that can be turned off in both. The feature set seems to be sufficient—the tie into Amazon and public libraries making it very convenient for uploading books.
I like that it’s online and that it’s pretty easy to use. I like being able to leave comments and ratings on books I upload. I like the list view, but wish the thumbnail image of the cover were displayed instead of a generic book icon. In the thumbnail view, book details are shown on mouseover which is a nice way to get more information about a book.
At first I thought that there was no way to create private bookshelves. But it turns out that you can create bookshelves that are private. You can also set other shelf properties (this is where you select wood grain, if that sort of thing appeals to you).
I didn’t like that it required my birthday or zipcode to sign up. The queries aren’t RESTful, so I can’t link to specific searches. Mostly I didn’t like that I can’t enter my Amazon Associate ID, so when someone buys a book from the service, GuruLib gets the love.
I don’t mind that they get something for their efforts, but it seems to me that they could share the wealth a little and not only be more fair to the people helping to build their service, but also give people an incentive to share their library. For example, let me enter my Amazon Associates ID and then give me every other referral. Maybe even give people with over a certain number of books 2 out of 3, or whatever. Incent people to use the service and get a little smaller piece of a much bigger pie.
Without some incentive, I’m unlikely to type in 1000 ISBN numbers (I’ve got at least that many books). Delicious Library, as an application that runs on my Mac takes advantage of the iSight camera to scan the bar code. Even as easy as that is, I only add things when I need to (usually when someone is borrowing them and I need to keep track of it) In any event, take a look at my test library.
Posted by windley on October 2, 2006 3:12 PM
Comment from Philip Weiss at October 2, 2006 6:27 PM
There seem to be about a billion of these web-based book cataloging programs. Every single one I've tried falls short in a huge way, at least currently.
My current solution has simply been to install Mediawiki on a sub-domain of kingrat.biz and use the free form nature and easy editing and link-making to catalog all my books. Then I just created categories authors, books, publishers, and a few other miscellaneous things. It's worked wonderfully for me so far. If I want to lend a book to someone, I can just throw the book in the "BooksLent" category. If I read a book I don't own (or once owned but have since sold/lost), I can simply put it in another category. MediaWiki builds nice category pages for looking for browsing, and I can use the search function for anything but title.
I've toyed with adding a semantic plugin for doing more with it, but I've stayed away so far because I didn't want to take the time to make a copy with which to play.
Comment from Phil Windley at October 2, 2006 6:34 PM
Looks like Wordpress, not MediaWiki, but still, it's simple.
Comment from Philip Weiss at October 2, 2006 6:47 PM
Sorry, should have been clear. The link is not to the book catalog; it's to my book reviews. I always just throw that in generally when I comment on blogs. The book catalog isn't public because I use copyrighted material in it (book descriptions, covers, etc.). I think it could be considered fair use but it's not something I want to test in court, nor do I want to come under the ire of the Free Software Movement for mixing content from the GNU FDL with CC-licensed stuff.
Comment from AC at October 3, 2006 12:04 AM
All 3 links at the bottom of http://www.gurulib.com/, including the misspelled "Terms of us" (instead of "Terms of use") simply point to the main page - so the site doesn't seem to have any privacy policy. That alone would deter me from signing up, right off the bat.
In addition, the front login page is a nearly exact copy of Google's Gmail login page, including the word "beta" in the top left-hand logo! Google can get away with letting users sign up for a beta service, because they are a large and well known organization. "GuruLib", on the other hand, seems to me to be a very shoddy piece of work at best, and not something I would be comfortable in posting my personal details to.
Comment from Rob Szarka at October 4, 2006 9:55 AM
I'm a big fan of librarything.com. I don't use Delicious Library myself, but I'm given to understand that LibraryThing is compatible with it.
Personally, I don't look for a specific set of features when evaluating a service like this. Instead, I first make sure I can take my data with me (via CSV export or the like) and then I look at how the developer works. I get the impression that Time at LT spends as much time listening to his users as writing code. In the year I've been using LT, it's gone from a reasonable way to catalog my books and find like-minded folks to a full-blown community.
Leave a comment
I encourage you to leave a comment below. Your email address will not be displayed on Technometria, but allows me to communicate with you directly. Your email address won't be displayed, but will be used to compute a MicroID for your comment.