Some time ago a friend invited to Goodreads, another one of these social networking sites where you open an account, add your friends, blah blah blah. As the name implies, this site targets a pretty strictly defined audience: bibliophiles. It’s a tool for book lovers to share their passion with their bookwormy peers — you can rate and review books and read through your friends rants or recommendations.

At the time, I wasn’t interested in adding yet another social networking site to my repertoire. Now that Facebook has a Goodreads app, I’m coming around. The app’s actions within Facebook are somewhat limited (Facebook directs you back to the Goodreads site to do anything more than rating a book), but it keeps my virtual bookshelves handy, and I secretly hope it guilts my friends into joining it too.

Current known competitors: Shelfari (I’ve heard the navigation isn’t up to snuff), Revish (which looks to be more text and less visuals), and LibraryThing (still in beta but doesn’t look bad).

I’m planning on using it to stay in touch with book group members while we’re all off reading the book of the month.

“There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.” - Bertrand Russell

(Note to Austin — I think any one who reads Ulysses reads it for the latter reason…am I wrong? )

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 5:28 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.