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keobooks's avatar

GoodReads, LibraryThing, Shelfari.. <other> Where do you like to review your books?

Asked by keobooks (14322points) March 4th, 2010

I am mostly on GoodReads, but I use LibraryThing a tiny bit too. I have friends who use several different ones and I wondered which one is considered the favorite?

*edited to add: Oops I should be more clear. Where do you WRITE your own reviews of books you’ve read and share them with others?

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9 Answers

DarkScribe's avatar

The New York Times reviews.

keobooks's avatar

@DarkScribe That is a good place to go for book reviews. I was wondering where people go to write there own, though.Unless you mean that YOU write for NYT. That would be awesome.

DarkScribe's avatar

@keobooks _was wondering where people go to write there own, _

Join some of the fiction forums and add your two cents.

aprilsimnel's avatar

WorldCat.com has reviews, when you look up a particular book.

aidje's avatar

I’ve been using Readernaut and LibraryThing. For the past couple of days I’ve been considering switching to Goodreads because I actually know one other person who uses it, but I don’t know anyone who uses the first two.

keobooks's avatar

@aidje That’s why I use GoodReads. My coworkers all use it (we are librarians and have to write a large numbers of reviews for readers’ advisory purposes.)

Originally, I used LibraryThing, only to get access to the Advance Reader Copies. But now GoodReads offers even more ARCs than LibraryThing. I am a tiny bit proud because I started a thread asking for this feature and it happened! It was probably in the works before I asked but I’ll pretend I was the one who got it rolling.

I’ve never heard of Readernaut. Maybe I’ll take a peek. I’ll likely stick to GoodReads, but I am curious about other sites.
—-

There are lots of good places to read good reviews, so thanks everyone who posted those, but I really like to write my own reviews and read reviews of people that I know. I have access to TONS of professional review magazines and websites in my line of work, but writing reviews and reading those of my friends is a nice way for me to mix business with pleasure.

aidje's avatar

@keobooks My impression at this point:

Readernaut is more well-designed and has better groupings for the books. Goodreads has Read, Currently Reading, and To Read. Readernaut has Finished, Currently Reading, Plan to Read, Abandoned, Reference, and Wishlist. I wish that Goodreads also had “Abandoned” and “Reference” included as options in the default/required shelves.

Goodreads seems more feature-rich (though there are a couple of omissions of features that Readernaut does provide, such as the ability to correct the number of pages in a given book, which is almost always wrong in such databases and really comes into play when you’re tracking your by page). Goodreads also appears to have a more active community.

But I realize you’re mostly talking about writing reviews. I only ocassionally write reviews and am more interested in the other aspects of these sites (tracking what I read, seeing what other people are reading, and discussing what we’ve read or want to read).

Addendum: Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Readernaut (other than the fact that no one else seems to have adopted it) is that it still lacks Facebook and iPhone apps. I wouldn’t ever use the Facebook app, but I think that having one would lead to increased adoption. I know far too many people who won’t do anything online unless they can do it through Facebook. An iPhone app would reduce friction in my own use of the service, i.e., I wouldn’t have to open my computer every time I want to update my progress or add a book which would mean that I could spend more time actually reading and less time getting distracted online.

keobooks's avatar

@aidje : when you say groupings for books, do you include cloud tagging in that? You didn’t mention it, but I was curious. One of Goodread’s shortcomings is that it doesn’t have cloud tagging. It shows you shelves that other people put it on but it’s not quite the same. LibraryThing has decent cloud tagging, but it only really works on very popular books.

A big part of Readers’ Advisory is suggesting read-alikes, and cloud tagging really helps out with that,

aidje's avatar

@keobooks I was referring to the default groupings that one has to select when adding a book to one’s profile. That’s another thing: Goodreads only has “shelves,” which end up becoming conflated with those default groupings and don’t quite function as one would expect tags to function. Readernaut has an actual tagging feature.

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