I just signed up for The Library Thing, another useful research tool. It helps to collect books but it serves a different purpose to a bibliography software such as Zotero.
You can look through your books by cover as in this (very uncomplete) list. But what's more useful are the recommendations, read-alike recommendations and member recommendations you get based on your library. It seems to work rather well as I have read most of the top titles in the recommendations list.
Maybe more for entertainment reasons it even has unsuggestions with titles that least connect to your book preferences. My current number 1 of unsuggestions is Byzantine Gospel: Maximus the Confessor in Modern Scholarship. What a relief. Followed by a close second: Digital Fortress by Dan Brown (what a relief) and further down: Dirty Jokes and Beer: Stories of the Unrefined (what can I say?). An entertaining list if you need a break.
I found myself spending more time with unsuggestions than recommendations. I should change that habit. Related the UnSuggester shows you pair opposites of books. Example: If you liked Kant's Critique of Pure Reason you will not like Confessions of a Shopaholic. It's hard to argue with that.
To test The Library Thing I signed up to a free account (free for up to 200 books) and simply exported my entire Zotero bibliography. It didn't pick up many of the books but managed to automatically extract 28 books, probably by the ISBN number. I wish it had a Zotero sync option though.
This could become a useful research tool, it's a bit like an electronic librarian. I just need to learn to focus more on the recommendations.
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