By Lisa Ruefenacht
Click here to visit Goodreads.com
There is, at times, a smell that pervades the air when certain people talk about literature. Maybe it’s the reek of mildewed pages, or wine and cheese gone stale from having sat for too long at a book-club meeting. Perhaps the pretentious literati can’t smell it because they’re too involved in the literature. Luckily, Goodreads contains neither smells nor a haughty forum for criticism. It is, instead, a simple yet fun site for readers to share their reading experiences with their online friends.
Like LibraryThing, Goodreads lets you catalogue your entire book collection in your personal profile. The site is powered by both Amazon’s and its own database, so the book catalog is thorough. You might not find the exact edition you have, but you’ll at least find the same title. Goodreads shows the book covers (as LibraryThing does), which may aid your search.
Goodreads differentiates itself from LibraryThing in that instead of passively receiving book recommendations and reviews from Amazon’s prescribed lists, users rate and write reviews of each book they post on their “read” shelves. The freshest reviews appear on each user’s profile page, but you can always find older reviews by browsing their “bookshelves”. Goodreads centers on users’ original reviews and recommendations. This means it’s best if your Goodreads friends have good taste—or if their bad taste matches your own.
A nice feature of the site is that wherever you find a book listing (on a friend’s list, a browse list, and so on), you are invited to assign it a star rating as well as to add it to your own booklist.
Goodreads also implements widget technology: If you want to post your reading habits on your HTML-compatible social-networking profile or blog, you can use a tidy little widget to redirect people to your Goodreads profile. This way, even if you’re not interested in devoting time to building your friend base on Goodreads, you can still use the site to keep people up to date on your latest literary endeavors. Upon registration, Goodreads invites you to sign up to receive e-mail updates when your friends post reviews.
The site includes a section devoted entirely to users’ writing, which brings a workshop feel to its aesthetic. You can upload short stories or full chapter books. Goodreads also highlights certain users each month, mostly established authors, so you can see what they’re reading. I hadn’t heard of most of the authors, but there’s a “Top Authors” section you can click on that includes popular writers such as J.K Rowling and Stephen King. (They don’t personally update their profiles, though.)
The application is clean—so clean it looks a little bare-bones. But Goodreads offers numerous ways to approach your reading. You can arrange your books by author, title, publication date, rating, or when you read the book. You can view your books by cover, in list format, or by shelf.
An annoyance is that Goodreads allows only full star ratings. Adding half stars would be a simple fix and a big improvement, in my opinion.
One useful feature that isn’t on Goodreads is a loan-out list. On LibraryThing you can show which users are borrowing which books and who’s next in line to borrow each book. This feature is invaluable for people with decent-sized collections, which seems to be true of many of LibraryThing’s users. It is primarily for keeping track of books you’ve loaned to real-world friends, not to the virtual friends you’ve made through the service. Goodreads has nothing like this.
Goodreads focuses more on user ratings than it does on cataloguing and formatting. If you’re looking more for a way to keep your endless collection organized, LibraryThing is probably a better fit. If you’re looking mainly for people-generated (versus database-driven) recommendations, then Goodreads is for you.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007 at 02:34PM 
