Find and Share a Good Read
The raft of social media sites that let you substitute face-time for virtual socialization just wouldn’t be complete without a book review and sharing site. Enter Goodreads.
When I started this review, I really was not personally interested in a social media site for books, but I thought it would be something interesting for Crucial Pop readers. However, after spending only about an hour on Goodreads, I have to admit I am enjoying it. Once I got over the “oh my God, what have I even read recently that wasn’t pop culture drivel?” syndrome, I overcame my hubris and started posting short reviews of pop culture drivel (which is actually all I read). Once I started looking at other people’s reading lists, I realized that’s all they’re reading, too.
The concept behind Goodreads is that people like to get recommendations from people they know. At Goodreads, you build a profile, connect with friends, and you share book reviews and recommendations. You can see what other people are reading and read their reviews. Since each book has a page with all of the reviews listed, you can get a pretty good feel for whether you’re going to like a book.
The Explore feature of Goodreads is how you find books you might like. It is fairly robust, although it would be nice to have search capability. As a sci-fi fan, I’d like to be able to search for books by their collective rating within a certain genre. The Book Shelves tab somewhat provides that functionality, but Goodreads could really develop some amazing search and recommendation functionality with all the data they are capturing.
Goodreads integrates user-generated feedback into a section called listopia. Since this data is user-generated, it results in more focused lists like Best Utopia, Dystopia, and Other World Fiction, Best Young Adult Novels, Best Historical Fiction, or The Movie Was Better than the Book. A nice feature of the Listopia data is the ability to browse by tags, which pull in related lists when clicked on. So the sci-fi tag brings up lists that included Time Travel Fiction and Hugo Award Winners. You can participate in the listopia feature by going to a list, ranking books within the list or adding your own favorites. It is fun – give it a try.
Another good way to discover and share books is to join a group and participate in discussions. Amazingly enough, when I searched on local groups, I found a group discussion on books in my local library. Since I live in a small town, this was a pleasant surprise.
To add friends, you can search by name or email address. Goodreads can also try to find friends based on who your Facebook friends are. In addition, as with all these type of sites, it will dig into your web mail program and bring up every contact (including RSS feeds and email newsletters) and suggest that you invite them to sign up. (Is it just me, or is this a blatantly self-serving feature?)
Goodreads does a good job of letting you save lists of books (e.g. books to read), categorize books into bookshelves and generally organize titles. While there is an RSS feed for your lists, there does not seem to be one for the listopia lists – too bad, as it would be nice to add these lists to your feed reader, iGoogle or My Yahoo.
If you enjoy reading and would like a way to find books that goes beyond reading the dust covers at the library or airport, you’ll enjoy Goodreads. Further, if you like to track, categorize, share and review books, you can really make good use of Goodread’s features. And if you join, make sure to add me as a friend. I need all the friends I can get...
