It's always very interesting to see the library of other people and especially the one of Peter Norvig... You may find books you don't know or see relationship between topics that you underestimated at some points.
Maybe it would be very interesting to see the bookshelves from HN users? I don't know if a lot of HN users have a LibraryThing account but it's a nice way to see what you share (or not share) in your bookshelves with someone else.
There are already two groups (moderately active) :
I've used my GoodReads (http://www.goodreads.com/) account in the past for this sort of thing. I didn't realize that there was such a selection of these "share what books you're reading" kinds of sites!
And there's even more... My personal favorite is http://readernaut.com/ just because the design is more modern and simple. Although it has the same problem I had with GoodReads: poor consolidation of editions of the same book, so you end up with so many duplicates. Compared to Wikipedia where there is only one page for "To Kill A Mockingbird" but many on GoodReads and Readernaut.
GoodReads has a pretty thorough-looking API (http://www.goodreads.com/api). Don't know if anyone has yet written a tool to just dump your entire account's contents to an XML file, but that seems like something that a motivated person could do. ;)
Maybe it would be very interesting to see the bookshelves from HN users? I don't know if a lot of HN users have a LibraryThing account but it's a nice way to see what you share (or not share) in your bookshelves with someone else.
There are already two groups (moderately active) :
http://www.librarything.com/groups/purelyprogrammers http://www.librarything.com/groups/computerscientists
An example of statistics or information that you can get out of it:
http://www.librarything.com/profile/adulau/stats/library http://www.librarything.com/profile/adulau (on the right side, "Members with your books")