Looks like LibraryThing and Shelfari just got served – Google Book Search now allows you to tag titles that you own and assemble an online catalog of your precious book collection. I liked the look of LibraryThing, but the idea of having to pay to catalog more than a few hundred titles was a deal breaker for me. Yet another business model trounced by the ubiquitous giants of search …

On the subject of libraries, the place where I work has a lot of old manuscripts which are, tricky to read – at least for anyone unaccustomed to 19th Century copperplate handwriting. So if the technical types who’ve developed the new ‘Blurred Shape Model’ optical character recognition system need someone to beta test it, we’d be more than happy to help. [Image by GeneralWesc]