Most recently, Shelfari has been acquired by Amazon for an undisclosed sum. In February 2007, Amazon invested $1 million in the social network. This would be just another chapter in the story of a successful little start-up, but for the recent acquisition by Amazon of AbeBooks, an online used and rare book dealer, which had a 40 percent minority interest in competing bibliosocial network LibraryThing.8
GoodReads is the last of the three most popular sites, which came on board in December 2006. They boast over 1.5 million users with over 40 million books added.9 Unlike the other two sites, GoodReads accepts advertising. Small banner ads appear at the bottom of user’s pages and larger sidebar ads are loaded on GoodReads’ blog pages. GoodReads also offers more entertaining social activities for its users. Recently, GoodReads introduced Listopia, with myriad lists created by users and open to contribution by anyone on GoodReads. Lists include “The Best Books of All Time,” “The Worst Books of All Time”, and “Thickest Books Ever.” It should come as no surprise that the “Best” and “Worst” lists share many titles. The lists get creative, and users can see which lists their friends have contributed to or commented on.
The most popular new feature on GoodReads at the moment is the Never-Ending Book Quiz. GoodReads members test each other’s knowledge of all things literary by submitting questions about books and authors. Book lovers beware: It’s highly competitive and utterly addicting.
Building the Perfect Beast
While LibraryThing, GoodReads, and Shelfari all offer the same basic no-cost online services of connecting people with shared reading interests through their catalogued libraries, most users show a preference for one over the other, though some users juggle two or sometimes three accounts. None of the three has yet pulled ahead in an informal survey of users in and out of the library world. But all users had definite reasons for their preferences. The primary reason given for preferring GoodReads over LibraryThing was the unlimited number of books added. Otherwise, most users found the two sites to be equitable in content and usability.
Most Shelfari fans appreciated the ease of use and the linking to Amazon for reviews and bookcovers. Shelfari’s bright and colorful interface is a plus for users, and one user appreciates “how easy it is to drop cover images from Shelfari into MySpace.”10
GoodReads users felt this service offered more social opportunities similar to Facebook or MySpace, and liked that it had no limit on the number of books that could be added. It is also “easier to add books from a mobile device.”11 There is the one shortcoming Bryan Jones saw in GoodReads: “I wish it had more privacy features so different parts of your profile could be viewed by different people.”12
LibraryThing fans praised the tagging features, the Early Reviewer program, and the Talk discussion board.13 One user created a list of all of the books booktalked for a conference program. She knew she would run out of time and referred the session attendees to her LibraryThing shelf marked “Conference08” for additional tags, annotations, and titles that weren’t mentioned.14
Library staff who use all three sites are finding interesting ways to supplement their RA services to the public. Susan Smith of Hodges University suggests using any of the three for youth summer reading programs. Participants “could keep track of their books read online and as part of it, they could agree to let [the library] link to their pages or use the widgets in exchange for an extra prize drawing slip.” Smith thought LibraryThing would be the best fit for an idea like this one because it could be tied into LibraryThing for Libraries. She also mentioned tagging each book “SRC 2009” (“Summer Reading Club”) or creating an SRC group for participants.15
Other library staff use these sites while on the public service desk. It’s a quick and easy step to click a “historical fiction” or “cozy mystery” tag or shelf and get many suggestions immediately for the patron waiting at the desk. A post on Book Group Buzz proposed using one of the three sites to record titles read and discussed by a book group. “It’s handy to have an easy, visual archive of the books you’ve selected in the past. Another shelf could collect books that you think the group should consider for future reading.”16
Tagging, the feature that all users appreciate the most, can also offer the greatest challenge to users. In a search of all three sites for the same book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, there were almost a hundred tags applied to this title. Some tags were as obvious as “food,” “memoir,” and “environment,” but other tags were more perplexing. “Cheryl,” “inspirational,” “slow food,” and “green” were some of the more unusual identifiers applied to this 2007 bestseller.
The variety of ways in which readers view books and apply descriptors may offer the best way to capture a book’s essence; however, it may also be quite confusing to use some of these terms to describe a book to a patron. In her article on folksonomies, Sharon Cosentino praises the inclusion of social tagging in library catalogs but cautions users, particularly library staff, to “pick your tag words carefully. Select a set of keywords you will readily recall and can use over and over…. Use five or six tag words.” One tag will have the reader wading through too many titles to manage, and too many tags may leave out other titles that deserve to be found. Avoid using tags that have the same meaning or tags that are too specific to the book. Consider adding an extra tag with year and month (e.g., “2008November”).17
Survival of the Fittest
Only time will tell how well LibraryThing and Shelfari ride out the recent incursion of Amazon into their reading worlds. Until then, choosing the optimal social network for books and readers will solely be up to the user, patrons, administration, and, quite possibly, what platform a library’s catalog can support.
Ease of use, quality of content, and even basic good looks may play into a user’s decision. But does a reader need all of them? Of course not. Michael Stephens warns the world about “technolust,” that “irrational love for new technology combined with unrealistic expectations for the solutions it brings,” which will only lead to technostress over the amount and speed of the new tools on the Internet librarians feel they need to keep up with.18
GoodReads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari aren’t the only places readers are exploring for their next book. MySpace and Facebook pages display bookshelves and host links and notes to other “good reading you may have missed.” Bibliophiles continue to read the myriad blogs devoted to books, publishing, and reading, and have even taken to “tweeting” their latest nightstand selections on Twitter.
Try out all of the Web toys out there. It’s the responsibility of a good readers’ advisor to at least be familiar with the numerous Internet playthings. But once they’ve all been taken for a test run, commit to one and politely show the others the door. It will be enough of a time commitment to keep one account current on a reading network, and it will be very important to keep that account up to date.
What library staff need to recognize most is that these bibliosocial networking sites are getting the vocabulary of appeal out there to readers. Librarians enjoy these websites. We are being friended by our patrons, book group members, online friends, and strangers who, it would appear through osmosis, are picking up the lingo of readers’ advisors and using it in their own descriptors of what they’re reading. A Web nation of feral readers’ advisors is being born, who in turn will inform their friends and colleagues of good books to read using the language we’ve provided in our tags, bookshelves, reviews, and annotations. Our own vocabularies and terms are changing as well. Library staff are beginning to use descriptors that our patrons understand better. The more we share the vocabulary of reading appeal, whether it is in person or online, the more connected our readers are to libraries, books, authors, publishers, and each other. Now that’s a social network.
Related Web Sites
Books I Read
This is a Facebook application. Users must have a Face-book page and then register to use this application.
Crime Space
A place for readers and writers of crime fiction to meet.
Facebook
A social network that will support imported bookshelves from Shelfari, LibraryThing, and GoodReads.
GoodReads
Users create a catalog of books read, to be read, and currently reading. It has more social Web features than Shelfari and LibraryThing.
LibraryThing
Users create a catalog of books read, to be read, and currently reading. A major focus is serving libraries.
MySpace
A social network that will support imported bookshelves from Shelfari, LibraryThing, and GoodReads.
Reader2Reader
A UK social network for readers.
Shelfari
Users create a catalog of books read, to be read, and currently reading. Fewer social Web features than GoodReads or LibraryThing, but very user friendly.
Correspondence concerning this column should be addressed to Barry Trott, Adult Services Director, Williamsburg Regional Library, 7770 Croaker Rd., Williamsburg, VA 23188; email: btrott@mail.wr.org.
Kaite Mediatore Stover is Head of Readers’ Services, Kansas City (Mo.) Public Library.