I’m just waiting, waiting, for the opportunity to say, during a philosophical argument, “Yeah? Well you can’t even SPELL Nietzsche!”

Here’s a GM script that might serve as a starting point: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/3517 - it adds a link to Google Books with the circulation status of volumes at a particular university library; it probably wouldn’t be too hard to mod it to show your own LibraryThing status instead…or even watch for results from Project Gutenberg in a regular Google search.

(Hm, this sounds possible. If I have some time I might try to tweak that script this weekend.)

A cleaner solution would be a LibraryThing/Google mashup using the Google API, but that would require a bit more programming.

Alas, no. I want full-text search.

Have you read Vernor Vinge’s latest, Rainbow’s End? In it, all the university library books are ripped apart and digitized, making them both more accessible and searchable. Delicious.

Hmmm. Maybe it is possible to make an add-in that will retrieve online editions of books in one’s personal library and search them. A tie-in to Google Book Search, as well as the Guttenberg Project, could be useful.

For LibraryThing, there are two general purpose fields: “comments” and “tags”. Again, you can put anything you want in there. You can browse or search by your own tags, or tags that others have used to describe the book. Unfortunately, it looks like even an “all fields” search will not turn up keywords entered into the comments field. This is probably an oversight by the developers, and I’d think the capability would be quite easy for them to add.

Is this what you had in mind?

I have a poor mind, but a good library. This is useful stuff to know about. Can it also index subjects and keywords for me, so I don’t have to read quite so much when looking for something I know just has to be there? I’m currently looking up references in Nietzche to the Cult of Assassins — quite laborious, as you can imagine.

As to the books, I’m tempted just to catalog the ones that have been boxed, as I’m now up to at least a dozen volumes that make me itchy because I can’t put my hands on them. Even a partial catalog would be helpful, at this point.

Hubber: Thanks! I’ll have to fire up a VM and give it a try. Maybe I’ll do a follow-up post with Libra and one or two of the other packages that I left out, such as Books, Booxter, and Readerware. Libra definitely looks on par with Delicious.

http://www.getlibra.com/

It’s equally slick, and doesn’t cost a penny. Supports the import of LibraryThing/Delicious as well.