Social Bookreading

So this is one of the things we learned in our library 2.0 class and it was really helpful in many other classes we took that year. We looked at LibraryThing, Shelfari, and GoodReads and I'm going to break down the merits of each, but I warn you I have a clear bias towards GoodReads.

So LibraryThing is the "thing" that we were given, so it gets to to first. The benefits of this one over the others is that it has full MARC coding, and is targeted to small libraries. The downside is that it is quite clunky to use, searching for series with the same title is time consuming and frustrating. Also I quickly used up my 250 book limit and was unwilling to pay further, even though it isn't much money. So in short I think this is mostly useful for small specialized libraries that need lots of detail and searchability, or that use it for cataloguing.

Shelfari is by far the prettiest of the three, and if you look to your left you will see that it is used on my blog to keep track of what books I talk about. I love the visual nature of it! It gives you a picture of a shelf and allows you to fill it with book covers. It is compatible with many other programs (not sure if it's owned by Google) and looks nice but I don't use it much for the social aspect. It is used by my book club to keep track of our reviews.

GoodReads! I love it like I love chocolate (Almost). It is big, it is easy to use, it also gives book covers but also lists title and author and other important info. You can also stalk favorite authors, many of whom have pages on GoodReads that they use to talk to fans. There are also user generated lists (best Gothic fiction, best characters you love to hate), trivia, and quotes.

As far as using it as a social media I can't talk much about that since I've moves almost exclusively to GoodReads and haven't used the others in this area much. I do know that GoodReads gives you recommendations and lets you know what friends are reading, but I don't know about the others. What I recommend is trying each and seeing which works best for you. Happy reading, and feel free to "friend" me.