Even so, it takes me up to 4 days to unpack and organize my books. Books should go in their neighborhoods, with some consideration for height so the shelves are efficiently used, and the ones I reread the most at waist to chest heights. Except for the atlases and encyclopedias, which should be near the floor so I can reach them easily when sitting down, surrounded by reference material. In theory I should be able to duplicate shelf structure from one apt to the next but I’ve never been able to manage that in practice.

But organizing by color?!? That’s for people who don’t read. You might as well buy books by the yard, or rows of fake books with fancy covers.

- WilliamB, not usually so intolerant of other people’s systems.

Best for reducing clutter — I download my LibraryThing list onto my PDA, so I never buy a book I already own and/or have read!

Pointing this out to her husband Paul (Reiser) he retorts “Oh, that’ll be handy if we ever want to read something orange!”

(I group my clothes and towels by color, but not my books.)

My friend has a book where she writes down who she has loaned the book to and the date. They have a large collection of books they are happy for people to borrow. In this way if she is looking for a particular book she can give that person a phone call and ask for it back.

It’s like Facebook, but for books. Bookbook? Anyway.

I started cataloging my books in preparation for going overseas – I want to be able to see which books I already own so I don’t buy them again. My collection’s fairly small by most standards so on Librarything I can just tag them with the location.

On the actual shelves, I group roughly by subject matter, but mostly I go by whatever looks prettiest.

For the first time I found cataloging my books (hundreds) easy and fun. All I had to do for most of them was wave them in front of the computer! The program got all of the meta-data off of the internet (like iTunes when you put in a cd)

I lost most of my library in Hurricane Katrina, so am acutely aware of the importance of knowing what books, what editions, and what signatures were on your shelf. It took me about a day. We were preparing to move, so every book got scanned on its way to the boxes. Now, re-shelving is easy as I can sort the books by collection, signature, author, subject, whatever. No more man handling as I try to figure out where to put the books!

They have similar programs for video games and CDs.

I can’t BELIEVE anyone would organize by color! Eeep. I mean, I can handle visually-pleasing arrangements within my alpha order (sometimes I stack books vertically to break up the space as well as to fit more books in) but it just seems so much harder if you’re not using my friend the alphabet! To each their own, I guess

There is little point in listing one’s library for replacement. So many things, particularly good art books, have small print runs and become rare or impossible to find very very quickly.

- user-defined tagging and/or comments
I use the tagging to categorise (fiction, non-fiction, read, to be read, wishlist, borrowed from library etc) and the comments to note where the book is (crime shelf, contempory shelf, kitchen, in drawer at work, on shelf at chap’s, sent to charity shop) etc. These functions means you can configure your online catalogue to exactly suit your real life ’system’ (or lack of it) but all the books are tied back to their ISBN, British Library etc ref. So in the event of having to restore your library, you can use a traditional method of listing them.

- mobile device access
If you’ve a big ‘to be read’ pile, you can look at your LibraryThing catalogue on your mobile phone or PDA whilst in a bookshop and realise that, actually, you already have a copy of that book waiting to be read so don’t buy it again! Thus stopping the cluttery ‘to be read’ pile from growing any bigger.

Having so many bookshelves, though, I tend to first split up books by general subject. Three shelves are devoted to sheet music and music theory, there’s a shelf for craft/drawing books, and three bookcases that cover things related to history, linguistics theory, religions, and ancient languages (yes, there are a couple separate shelves for modern languages).

Within a grouping, I organize by height — so much that some people might thing I’m a bit obsessed. If there are books by the same publisher that are the same height I try to group those together if they aren’t already.

The only place I have organized by color is my piano music where the books are the same height. It’s only one shelf (or most of a shelf), but it has worked very well since I am a very visual person.

Part of me in reorganizing one group of bookcases by color — the ones with books history, linguistics, etc. In that case, the bookcases are a focal point of the room and it might be neat. At least in the beginning, I’d have to organize by height as well. And part of me doesn’t want to split up paired books that aren’t in the same color, but there are only a few cases of that.

By the way, I just found out that the twice annual library book sale is having it’s 10 cent day today. Resisting the urge. No more books! For now.

Maybe someday I’ll check out LibraryThing or something similar. Right now, I just have way too many books to want to do that.

Currently, all our fiction is now by author (I have to do a linear search for some of my favorites because I don’t remember the author off the top of my head) within a given genre. I’ve managed to keep a bastion of topical organization in the non-fiction.

Going through them on a case by case basis worked will I read it again was the only question asked. We got rid of five boxes of books! (though both TP sets remain…)

I’m going to go through these organisation methods with him tonight and hopefully we’ll get the ones we have left (still a vast number) sorted.

The thing that causes friends more distress is how few books we own – some of my friends own thousands, if not tens of thousands. We get rid of nearly everything we’re not going to read again.