The social networking site for booklovers may not be new, but it is one of my favorite 2.0 sites out there. You can file this one with 2.0 sites that make library work easier alongside LibraryThing and LibraryElf, only this one is much better as your own personal reader’s advisory tool.
It works like this: you go to www.goodreads.com and sign up with a username and password. Next, you can use the friend finder to see who you already know who may be on goodreads and add them as a friend if (and this is an important caveat) you think you would like similar books.
Next, you can search by title, author or keyword to find books you read, are reading or want to read and can simply click once to “add to your books.” The whole site is intuitive and scalable – you can add as much or as little metadata to the books that you want. You can simply select the books you are reading to keep track of them, or you can write reviews, rate books, tag them with your own set of keywords, even sit them on certain shelves! Lots of my library friends have a special shelf for books that they don’t have at their local library and which they want to get through interlibrary loan later. You can add books to your “to read” list so that you can easily find them later. No more checking out too may books that I can’t read before the due date! Now I have one place for all the books I want to read so I won’t forget next time I make a visit to the library. You get an email digest of what your friends are reading (if you like) and how they review and rate books, and this is the way that I keep on top of all the coolest books that I want to read. It works with Facebook and Twitter, so you can roll all your data right on over to whichever other social networking site you are already using!
You can write reviews of books with a couple clicks (easier than a blogpost) and should you so aspire to clean up the data on the site or add pictures and reviews, you can become a “librarian” – the term they use for end-user site administrators. How can you not love that?
I have a group of friends across the country who send around boxes of books and media to each other as a traveling lending library, and we use Goodreads as a way to keep track of who has what, and who wants to read which book. Really, the possibilities are limitless.
If you are already on goodreads (or want a friend when you sign up) then come find me! My username is gnatalie (at) gmail (dot) com. Happy reading!
Filed under: New Ideas
I love goodreads! Not only is it a fun way to see what friends are reading, it’s a handy way for me to keep track of my own reading for the sake of Readers’ Advisory. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone blank when someone asks me to recommend a good book I’ve read recently.
I used to keep track of my “done reads” on an Excel spreadsheet, but it became frustrating to try to add books from home and work if I forgot my flash drive. With goodreads, I can categorize the books as I want, and it will plug in all the biblio info for me automatically. Where has this been all my life?
I totally agree. And who hasn’t checked in library books and found mysterious heiroglyphics throughout ostensibly indicating to the reader that they have already read that one?! This is a great tool for the public librarian to market to the patron who can’t seem to keep track of what he/she is reading, or what has been read!