Since I just transplanted myself from NYC to Houston and didn't bring any books down here with me, my bookshelf consists of 2 books by Andy Remic, Contagious, Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' Omnibus, The Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and a book about serial killers..  hmmm perhaps I shouldn't be judged by my bookshelf..

In the immortal words of Socrates "I Drank What?!"

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A life empty of laughter is not worth exerting the effort it takes to live it.

It worked interchangeably with ReaderWare and LibraryThing. I'm not aware of any other sites it works with.

or does Library Thing have one that will work for an iTouch? Still feeling my way around the app field.

What's your overall feeling/impression of Library Thing? Would you say it's as strong of a community/product as Netflix is for movies? It looks fairly cool, but I'd like to get an insider's impression.

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A life empty of laughter is not worth exerting the effort it takes to live it.

It's the German version of Infected, isn't it? Can you actually read German?

Or is it more a "Dude, look at this cool foreign Sigler swag I have!" kind of thing?

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A life empty of laughter is not worth exerting the effort it takes to live it.

If you include comic books, easily yes. I saw there were a couple of those on your front page, but they didn't look like standard comics to me. Figure they may just have been categorized that way by whatever system you're using (eg Amazon, Library of Congress, etc.)

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A life empty of laughter is not worth exerting the effort it takes to live it.

Not sure about the iTouch functionaility although LibraryThing has a pretty limited connectivity page right now.

I think LibraryThing is as much or as little as you want it to be.  I doin't find it as interactive as GoodReads.com but the infrastructure at GoodReads is a little maddening. LibraryThing has reall author's who use it and interact with people, but I really use it for cataloging (mostly for insurance purposes) and less for interactivity with others.  They have a pretty robust free book sharing/ free advance reader copy functionalilty which I have benefited from immensely. Be aware, however, that if the site is free until you get to the insane level that I have...then to place more books in you have to pay a very modest fee.  For the benefits it provided me, I actually donated more than what they asked. 

In re: to it's similarity to Netflix, I find it about the same actually.  It does the same type of comparisons of book tastes and I find it much easier to navigate.

I don't own any comics, per se, but I do own quite a few collections of manga and a few graphic novels.  As with less picture intensive novels, graphic novels and manga are all given ISBN's which LibraryThing references through either Amazon or the Library of Congress or the 20 other sources they use.

In re: to the number of books in my catalog, JP and I were discussing, offline, how some of the specialty books don't have ISBN's and are a little more manually intensive to enter into a site like LibraryThing.  For instance I have the Harvard Classics made up of 52 books a rare completed collection of Zane Grey novels (Walter J Black edition of 75 books) as well as some Easton Press books that haven't made it into my LibraryThing collection simply because it requires manual entry. If your collection contains BCE or other specialty editions, you may want to consider how much it means to you to enter them into the site as it will take quite some time.

Virulent is the German language version of Contagious.  Infected was actually named Infiziert.  And interestingly enough, the German language version of EarthCore was named ... wait for it.... EARTHCORE!

And don't you know, Gmork speaks *all* languages

One of the hazards of having owned a comic shop, I suppose. My best friend is not shy AT ALL about telling people that I am a comic book poser. I stopped collecting almost immediately after we sold the store. I'm not a huge comic book (or graphic novel) fan. It's that whole mass market paperback snobbery thing again. btw, comic books purchased in grocery stores & newstands do have bar codes It's only the ones that go straight to comic shops that do not have them. Sometimes which edition you have will alter the value of a comic.

So what I hear you saying is that it is an invaluable service to you, BUT I should be careful if I have a lot of older books w/o bar codes or special editions and the like. Sounds like the manual entry function is more trouble than it's worth. Is that correct?

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A life empty of laughter is not worth exerting the effort it takes to live it.

.....you are going straight to LibraryThing's web site rather than using an app? That sounds easy enough to bookmark. And most decent bookstores have WiFi.

My primary use would be as a catalog, and the secondary function would be to get recommendations similar to how Netflix suggests movies. Sounds like LibraryThing is good for that sort of thing. I'm not too interested in live interaction with other people. The only real aspect of the community I'd be interested in would be reviews. I'm guessing *any* book service would have decent reviews of a large selection of books. That's true of LibraryThing, isn't it?

What is your definition of a small amount of $$$? I have no problem donating if I find a service valuable, but if it's a recurring maintenance fee, that might be a problem. It's not like storage space costs much at all these days. Look at what Libsyn charges, and that's for massive amounts of data uploads. The storage is free.

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A life empty of laughter is not worth exerting the effort it takes to live it.

I do own comics. Mr Gmork just reminded me that I own several copies of Lobo. My eldest brother and I were fanatics for Lobo when that series first came out.  Bad Gmork!

And yes, you've summarized my experience very succinctly.

......my ex-wife/best friend created for me when we used to date. Methinks you will enjoy it.

LOL. Your words brought back an old memory. Kate (ex/best) & Brandy (diff ex/best) were both huge Teen Titans fans. I'm sure you know enough about comics to know their story lines are kind of like soap operas, right? So they spend like 20-30 minutes telling me & another of my friends this 70-100 issue story arc. We then proceed to sum it all up in one or two sentences. They fail to find a flaw in our summation and are completely crushed. I think that's when they began to become disillusioned about comics, but I could be mistaken. It was far past time. We were in frakkin' college for Christ's sake!

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A life vacant of laughter is not worth exerting the effort it takes to live it.

Gmork, this is the piece of art I was talking about lower down in the thread: [flickr-photo:id=4306527572,size=m]

Figured I'd bounce it up so we wouldn't have to scroll down anymore

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A life vacant of laughter is not worth exerting the effort it takes to live it.

That's actually a really great depiction of both characters!  My mind is reeling with the possibilities of badass ass kicking that would take place between Lobo and Batman.  Personally, I'd put my money on Lobo. Cause he fights dirty!

All Bats really has going for him is a few gadgets and his brains. Lobo actually has quite a few powers. The only reason he lost against Supes if I recall correctly was that his unending radio station went off air temporarily. Kryptonian saboteurs, I bet

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A life vacant of laughter is not worth exerting the effort it takes to live it.

that was actually during the fight with Vril Dox, former leader of L.E.G.I.O.N. (he may still be the head honcho, I haven't followed monthly comics in a long damn time).  Dox also stole the Main Man's ability to replicate through bodily fluids (such as blood, you pervs).

I know of at least 2 times that Lobo and Superman fought, once back in the day where Lobo beat the everloving hell out of Supes, brought a mountain down on top of him, and left him for dead. 
Then there was a fight about 15 years ago that was kind of a draw because, (again, this is a distant memory and I no longer have that issue) some other bad guy came to attack and they ended up tag teaming him.

It still chaps my ass to this day that people picked Wolverine over Lobo when the two went at it.  How that's possible, I don't know as Lobo is pretty much immortal:  Heaven has a memo out never to collect his soul and Hell has flat out refused to take custody.
You gotta be a suave motherfragger for that to happen.

Saddly, rumor has it they've cut the nuts off of the character and now he's found religion and is serving over a small colony of aliens in the far reaches of space....I wish I was making that last bit up. 

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the trick to staying sane is to just out-crazy the world

I think the extent of my Lobo reading was the original 4 part mini series. All of my Lobo knowledge comes second hand from ex-wife/Best friend (Kate). She was (is?) a total Lobo freak.

I thought he was a pretty cool character and enjoyed the mini series, but when it comes to minitue you'd smoke me. I thought he could still regenerate himself up from a single cell. That's what I meant by nigh invulnerable. I'd forgotten about the Heaven & Hell series where they essentially disowned his soul.

That's really sad that they've 'retired' him for now. But, as with just about every comic character, they can always bring him back. Superman is an excellent example. "Hey, let's kill him! Yeah, that'll get us some press. Oh, now there's four Supermen. Oh, wait, none of those are the REAL Superman."

There's a very good reason that I am not a big comic fan. Sandman was stellar, but I still didn't care for the format/medium.

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A life vacant of laughter is not worth exerting the effort it takes to live it.

Lobo just happens to be one of the few comic characters I’ve actually kept up with over the years (The Punisher being the other.  And on the subject of, yes, I know they’re still putting the Max series out, but fuck whoever at Marvel greenlit this “Frankencastle” bullshit).

At this stage, I tend to just get graphic novel versions of shit as I’m horrible at waiting for monthly releases and enjoy having everything wrapped up in one handly little volume.

Your example of Superman is pretty much while even as a kid I never got into super hero comics; they just ended up being too goddamn daffy.

As a fan of Sigler and someone who can stomach comics to a certain degree, I have a feeling you would still enjoy the series Preacher by Garth Ennis.  It’s one of the few works that seems to transcend “just a comic” and show that the medium can be used for something more than super heroes in tights.

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the trick to staying sane is to just out-crazy the world

vampire/werewolf/wereleapord/weretiger/werelion and human sex in them???  Enquiring minds want to know!!!!

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he's got to be bad!

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Head Coach

Wabash Wolfpack

The only one I can think of is Howling Mad by the great Peter David. It's about a wolf that gets bitten by a werewolf and turns into a human every full moon.

BigJohn

That I stick to the same authors, Tolkien, Wilbur Smith, Robert Jordon - The Wheel of Time, and of Course Mr Sigler.  I tend to stick to the things I love