I recently created a profile and I have just added the books resting on my desk. Adding book is easy as Librarything (potentially) searches more than six hundred databases in several languages. As I registered an account just a few days ago I do not have any experience with the recommendations. However, according to Atle they are quite good.

As you should see above, it is quite easy to integrate a list of your books into your web site using pre-made Java Scripts. Librarything provides an API as well but I have not tested it. However, it should be possible to integrate a whole lot of information about the books you have in your catalog into your site.  The best thing is that the site provides cover scans for most of the books and they let you integrate these scans into your site as well, for non-commercial purposes that is. They did not have the cover for one of the books I had on my desk. However, they had the cover of an earlier edition of the book which was written by a Swedish author. EDIT: A user had uploaded that cover scan for this book as well so I was able to get a cover for this book as well.

I will start using Librarything, at least to see how it works. I might also include it here in my blog. Regardless of what I do, you should check out Librarything for yourself.

Personally, I think this is great news. By providing their works at no cost (preferably also with the freedoms attached), artists and software developers are able to attract people who are willing to pay for their services. I believe this is the future for an increasingly larger share of the software industry. Attract customers with free, both as in free beer and free speech, commodity and charge for value-adding development and services.

I have personally seen the same with other books as Producing OSS by Karl Fogel, Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel, several books by Eric Raymond, and the O’Rilley’s Open Books project. Even though they are available for free I have ended up buying several of these books (which I recommend). Bruce Eckel claimed that the feedback he got from his online readers enabled him to write an even better book. This is very much the same as with a lot of the high quality open source software out there. Open it up to contributions from others.

Having material freely available on the Internet enables artists to reach out to new potential fans. I would never have found nor bough anything from stand up artists like for instance Carlos Mencia, Steven Lynch, and Jeff Dunham if it wasn’t for the Internet and youtube. I have also found music and movies in the same way. So keep up this free trend. I believe it will pay off for everyone in the end, well except perhaps for distributors of movies, music and so on.