The Google Powered Book Catalog

Oh hell yes.

Google's just added the ability to create a book catalog powered by their Book Search site (details at RadYak).

I've already got the ISBNs for all my books thanks to my efforts obsessively adding my collection to The Nexus, importing them into 'My Library' was a 10 second job. And because Google makes your library public, you can browse my library.

Two things you'll notice, it's:
1) pretty limited in what you can enter (review, rating, labels) -- and it won't let you import these prepopulated.
2) biased towards American releases, so it missed more than half my books; and we miss out on lots of covers and most of the better details you get for American books -- but I'm thinking that will improve as more publishers get on board.

There's an 'export to XML' functionality that's just begging to be used. Hell, if I'm lucky they'll provide an API to write stuff back to their online library and the Google Book Search library will become the back-end for The Nexus.

At the very least I'm thinking a diff tool that takes multiple libraries and outputs a Venn diagram of books in common. Oh yes, that will do nicely.