Online Book Communities

I have been investigating online book communities.  Online book communities are like social networking sites for book lovers. On all but Biblionasium you can connect with people who have similar tastes in books.  These communities are also great to use when you are looking for something new to read. 

Today I am going to review five of these communities - Goodreads (http://www.goodreads.com/), Booklikes (http://booklikes.com/), Library Thing (https://www.librarything.com/), Shelfari (http://www.shelfari.com/) and Biblionasuim (https://www.biblionasium.com). 

 I have been using Goodreads for about a year now, so I am most familiar with it.  Here is a screenshot of my profile.

 

I use Goodreads to organize the books I have read, are currently reading, intend to read and the books that are my favorites on my four shelves.  I can easily add shelves if I want to get more detailed in my organization. Goodreads allows me to connect with my friends through Facebook and Twitter.  I can also connect it to my Amazon account and add books through that.  There are discussion boards and trivia games that are sometimes fun.  The thing I like best is that I can read book reviews from people like me and see if the book I'm interested in reading is really something for me.  I like the way the book covers are displayed.  It is easy for me to go in and review books and move them from one shelf to another.

 

Here is a screen shot of my Booklikes profile. 

 

Booklikes looks a lot like a blog to me.  It opens to a dashboard that has postings from various people.  The reviews and blog entries that are on my dashboard are not connected to the kinds of books I put in, so they may or may not be of interest to me.  I did not find this site as easy to use as Goodreads.  I could not upload my favorite books and I ended up searching for each one individually.  One book that I wanted to add was not in the database, so I was out of luck on that one. 

 

My profile of Library Thing.

 

Library Thing was very easy to use.  I was able to upload my Amazon wish list to the site in bulk and then put the books on shelves.  I only have four shelves on this one too.  Moving the books and rating them was easy.  Library Thing website says that you can join the "world's largest book club" on it.  I understand that Library Thing will connect you to people that have cataloged the same books you have and it will also suggest what you might want to read next.  Another neat little feature is the "On This Day" section.   One drawback to this site is that it is free only up to 200 books - then it charges fees.

 Here is Shelfari.

 

Shelfari is by Amazon.com.  When I first logged into site with my Amazon account it took a very long time to load.  I was just about to give up on it and restart it when it finally opened. Since then, I have found myself "waiting on shelfari.com" periodically.  That aside, it was  easy to put the books that I have ordered from Amazon onto my shelf.  It was easy to organize my books and quick to go back and rate them.  To note them as favorites, all I needed to do was click the heart.  I like the way the site displays the book covers on the shelves.  It is makes it easy to find and rate the one I want.  You can connect with friends through Facebook and Twitter and find discussion groups.  Groups are easy to find via tabs under Community.

 This is Biblionasium.

 

Biblionasium is a secure site and the groups are closed.  To add books to the bookshelf, I had to type each title or author in individually.  If I wanted a series, I had to search and add each individual title.  Books are pretty much limited to the elementary and middle grades.  Although, while I was searching for Divergent, the author Diana Gabaldon showed up in the search!  I know she writes adult books, so I clicked on her name to see if she maybe had written a children's book I didn't know about.  No books were found.  On my quest for Divergent, I only found the audio version and no other titles in that series.  It did give me the option to add the titles.  I think this would be a good choice for a classroom teacher to make reading suggestions to students.

 In closing, I like Goodreads best.  Maybe it is because I am most comfortable with it because I have been using it for a while.  I use Goodreads regularly to see what my friends are reading and check reviews of books I am considering purchasing.   I did like Library Thing a lot, but I think it is possible that I will quickly reach 200 books and I don't want to pay for the service.  I did not like Shelfari as much as Goodreads or Library Thing.  I did not like Booklikes at all.  Biblonasium is good for teachers and students to connect, but I don't think it meets my needs.