Soulless (The Parasol Protectorate #1) - by Gail Carriger

[kandake]

Rules to live by: 1. Don't forget your parasol, and 2. Don't panic!
~ peril, intrigue, romance, and wit in a Steampunk casing ~

4/5I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the alt-Victorian/Steampunk world of Gail Carriger's Soulless. I awarded the book 4 stars, but that rating reflects a bit of confliction on my part. I loved most aspects of the

Comments

[prezzey]

You can combine misspelled titles and redundant authors yourself. Every author page has an "Author Disambiguation" box where you find all the relevant information. It takes about 30 seconds to combine two authors so if you see a duplicate you can go ahead and combine them yourself.

I think you misunderstand the concept. The site is organized more wiki-like than monolithically, you can change things if you don't like them, edit everything to your heart's content, ask others to help, etc. The only thing you cannot do is change the actual contents of other people's catalogs. So you can misspell etc. everything in your own catalog, everyone else can do that in their own catalogs too, and you can define a pointer from both to the same overarching author/work/etc to let the site and others know it's the same. (For most books this is attempted automatically, even my Hungarian books usually end up combined right... though I've just had to combine an obscure Hungarian translation of an obscure Finnish novel with the Finnish original by hand.) To be honest I prefer this to other sites, but it's a matter of personal preference. I have a friend who kind of faints at the thought that other people can change so many things.

It's also more of a cataloging site than a discussion site, though some of the groups are very lively, and I've met several nice people (locally too) and received very useful advice from them. But it's much more focused on cataloging than discussion IMO. It also has a very robust recommendations engine that I've found much more useful than eg. the Amazon engine*. It got to the point recently that it tells me which books I am going to borrow from the library next (without me telling anyone, of course), sometimes it's a bit scary :D I go to the library and when I get back, I find something I've just picked up on impulse in my "Recent Recommendations". So either they are wiretapping libraries in various Central European locales (I doubt that, given one of my libraries cannot even implement an electronic catalog properly ^^; ) or the algorithms and the data fed to them are simply very good.

There is one thing I really don't like in Librarything though, I think the privacy settings leave a lot to be desired. You can either hide everything or display everything and there is nothing inbetween. So there is no friends-only option, etc. (at least there wasn't last time I checked!) I think that's a really glaring omission. Well, at least now everyone in the wide world knows my taste in books, so there is no excuse for messed-up book gifts any longer!!! >:D

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* - Amazon somehow decided along the line that I wanted books on child abuse. I wonder why since I don't think I ever bought a single book on that topic from them, though I did buy several technical books on developmental psych for work. Then again, lately I've been buying everything I can't get locally from Book Depository anyway.

[kandake]

I'm so sorry, but I somehow managed to miss this comment! I wasn't ignoring it. (I was reading back through this thread and realized what I'd missed.)

I've taken your words into consideration and am re-thinking LibraryThing. I think you're right - I've misunderstood something or overlooked some of its core value. I am going to give it another look and see not only what I might have missed, but also what may have changed. (I have several new reviews I need to get posted to this blog, as well. Slacking again!)