A while back I started tinkering around with Shelfari.com, which is kind of a social networking site for book …people. Since then, the developers have continued to tweak, improve, and add to the site so that I’m liking it more and more. It has also accumulated more and more users, which I’m told is important for endeavors of a social nature. At any rate, I thought it would be worth mentioning here, as well as taking the opportunity to point you to my virtual bookshelf on the site.
What you’ll find there is a collection of books that I’ve read in the last few years, though it won’t be completely different than the record I keep on my own website. You’ll get to see the same reviews which I have repurposed there, but you’ll also see the virtual shelves and comments of some of my friends and some of the other random comments I’ve made.
So far I still find Shelfari less than perfect as a conduit to the lives of strangers (too many people have strange tastes and intractable opinions on books, when they bother to express them at all), but it shines as a way to keep track of what like-minded friends are reading. Towards that end, if you read or listen to books, I’d encourage you to sign up for an account, add me as a friend, and populate your digital bookshelf. Then you should totally go through all my reviews and mark them as “helpful to you” if you are so inclined so that I can build some cred. You know, to keep it real.
I signed up a while ago when I first heard you mention it, I need to start adding my books.
Have you ever looked into Goodreads (www.goodreads.com)? Similar idea… Although I have to say from the tour alone Shelfari looks cooler. It resembles an application I have on my mac called (wait for it) Library. I may just join Shelfari. And then do absolutely nothing with it just like with my Goodreads account. So I can be consistent. Now, if Shelfari could hook into my Library and upload my catalog there (still quite incomplete, but something) *drool*.
Huh. I think I may actually like the goodreads interface better. It’s a lot cleaner and neater than Shelfari. If I have one criticism of Shelfari it’s that its interface is ugly and more than a little clumsy and unintuitive. You have to do way to much clicking around to, say, see all of someone’s reviews.
On the other hand, Goodreads seems to be demanding that I create an account before I can even really explore the site and look up books, which annoys me greatly just because of the principle of the thing.