LibraryThing

I meant to post this earlier but only got around to it now...

Last Thursday, Kim mentioned the website that let's you post a list of the books you own (your personal library) online, and then you can see who else has a similar library/books to you. It's called LibraryThing. Here's an article about it. It seems like a pretty neat idea, and I couldn't resist posting my own personal library on the site. Unfortunately, you can only list 200 books for free, and it costs $10 a year (or $25 for life) to add books over 200.

It was brought up in the conversation because the article mentions the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). As Kim mentioned, the top 6 books that are owned by the most people on the site are the first six Harry Potter books. I believe she also mentioned that the BCP is in the top 25 books (I thought) owned by the most people. To clarify, according to the article the BCP (along with The Complete Calvin and Hobbes and Neil Gaiman's The Absolute Sandman Vol. 1) is among the top 25 books with the highest ratings by members. This means that members can rate books on how much they like them, and the BCP is a highly-rated book. It's rating is 4.37 (out of 5) on the site. Currently, however, only 528 (out of about 160,000) members have the BCP (any edition) in their library, and there are 1,809 more popular (i.e., owned by more people) books on the site than it.

And, while we decided that a lot of Episcopalians (certainly at St. Stephen's) are librarians and therefore possibly more likely to have used LibraryThing and posted their libraries--and thus they would have a copy of the BCP--it appears that it's less that there are lots of Episcopalians who are LibraryThing users but rather that the majority of BCP users find it to be a very quality book and highly rate it. Interestingly, Episcopalians actually don't appear to be as well represented as users of LibraryThing as in the general U.S. population. Episcopalians (as based on those who have the BCP as part of their library) make up only 0.3% of LibraryThing users, while the 2.4 million Episcopalians in the denomination (according to church statistics, though U.S. census figures give about twice that much) are 0.8% (or 1.7%) of the U.S.'s 301 million population.