Setting up an account on Shelfari this past week was the first time I have ever used a social bookmarking "book" site. While the concept has always sounded intriguing to me, the idea of inputting all the books I own or have ever read always seemed a bit too overwhelming a task to undertake. I also never really understood the reasons (before this week, that is!) why people needed to advertise to the online world what books they were reading. But this week's assignment forced me to bite the bullet and jump on the book-bookmarking-bandwagon. I chose Shelfari because I hadn't heard people raving about it as much as I had in the past with goodreads and libraryThing: http://www.shelfari.com/o1518075727/shelf
I can see how people get addicted to this type of thing. Shelfari makes it very easy to add books to your "shelf" and displays them in a very visually pleasing manner (one even has the option to change the stain of the shelf's "wood".) Books can also be viewed in a "list view" as well. Your shelfari shelf is divided into three sections: "Books I've read," "Books I'm reading" and "Books I plan to read". I can see how this "plan to read" section might especially serve as a helpful reminder whenever one hears of a good book he or she would like to read in the future. Books read can be tagged and rated (and marked as favorites, owned or "wish list" titles.) People using shelfari can add friends and set up different "groups". A nice thing about the group option is that they can be private (which could allow the group to, more or less, discuss books together as they might in a book group.) All users can read (and write) book reviews in the public domain, and "shelves" can be displayed in one's blog or website. Like most other social bookmarking sites, reading users' reviews and searching for books by tags is a great way for people to find book recommendations.
While I found shelfari to be a very visually pleasing site, I also felt that the book information windows that pop-up whenever one rolls over a book's image were rather annoying (albeit necessary to the site's purpose.) If I were to continue using shelfari in the future, I'm sure I'd eventually end up abandoning the pretty "shelf" view of the books and opt to use the more efficient "list" view in order to avoid all the pop-ups. I also would love to spend more time reading the author features and clicking through the most popular books links when I have more time to spend. To me, shelfari seems to be more of a place for readers to have fun tagging, finding and reading about books online, than as a necessary tool for organizing one's personal library.
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4 comments:
Shelfari sounds like an interesting site. I like what you said about setting up online book groups - this could be really good for library book groups. However, I have a Goodreads account that I never use (like you, I don't really see the point of these kinds of sites), so I don't think I'd jump on the Shelfari bandwagon.
I use Goodreads which is very easy to use. For this assignment I used Library Thing. I think there is probably an untapped usage of these things in libraries...they would never implement a virtual book club at my neighborhood library, but with these devices you could start your own...awesome.
Like you, I haven't used any book-bookmarking sites before and also chose Shelfari. I have so many books that trying to add them all to the computer would be a full time job in itself. However I love the visuals of the site and I think it would be a great way for a library to display new books on its webpage.
Very good point about the groups!
Interesting comments before mine. I'm the sort of person who actually enjoys entering data about my books into a database (but I already have one on my hard drive and transferring that data to an online service is not easy). I use LibraryThing and like it, but some of the features you describe for Shelfari are interesting (and a mere fraction of my collection has been entered into LT so far).
One interesting thing about LibraryThing is that the head honcho is very aware of library issues (to the point of being a regular participant on a cataloguing listserv). I don't know if the other online "book-networking" services are as library-friendly (or even library-interested).
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