I've been looking for book catalog system for a while now, I've tried a few but all desktop based ones. The problem with these are that they're not platform independent, hard to share with other people, just more things to backup etc etc.
I have been considering writing my own for a while now, today again I figured I should start on this, then I read about Library Thing on Blogspotting.
Library Thing is fairly typical for todays online tools, you add the books by ISBN or title, author etc, it searches Amazon in many countries or the Library of Congress in order to find all the information about the book, including images. You can tag your photos, it shows tag clouds, author clouds etc and will help you find other people who share your taste in books.
Crucially it has a export function that lets you save your data locally, import into Excel or whatever. Great site, I put my 170 books into it in about a hour.
You can see my catalog of books, hopefully soon there will be a API that lets you build on-top of it. So far I am within the free account limit, but I cannot see why I wont upgrade to a paid account soon.
Where's your list? What's the link? I'd be interested to see your catalog of 170 books. (Not that I'm a geek or anything!) ;-)
This was great to read. Apologies for posting here; you turned off comments over on LT.
Send me a note about what you want the API to do. I'm going to do one, but I want to build from what people want not just build everything right away. My inclination is to start with global stuff--book recommendations, etc., not with individual libraries. That said, what do you want to do with it? Also, I'm picturing REST returning simple XML. Is this your expectation too, or were you interested in MARC records, etc.
BTW: You wrote it was fairly typical in its use of Amazon and libraries. (Or maybe you meant the feel of it was typical.) On the library front, LibraryThing is the first and only online service to go beyond Amazon. Some of the offline ones do, but online it's the only one that takes cataloging seriously enough to get real information.