Battle of the Online Book Communities

Online book communities brings books lovers together to display, review, rate, recommend and discuss books. There are many to choose from but which one is the best. I explored four major book communities (Goodreads, Shelfari, Booklikes, and LibraryThing) and the following are my findings. Use the links to signup for free accounts and determine on your own which is the best for you. 

Goodreads is one the most popular book communities available. My favorite feature is the book recommendations according to my bookshelves and ratings. The recommends are organized into genres without any input from me. It doesn't really give you too much information on the book other than the rating, reviews, summary and author. There are links to more product details through online purchasing. It is user-friendly and offers more discussion groups because of its large member base.

Shelfari was my favorite online book community because it was fast and easy to use. I could import books already on my goodreads account by just copying the URL and pasting it into my shelf. It took me a while to figure out how to import from another book community or list but once I figured it out it was easy. Another drawback was it importing onto the main bookshelf without separating them into categories. There was an easy remedy by just clicking the edit button on each book I could change its location and give a rating. You could also do the same thing to add books from the Books tab. When clicking on the book, it would bring up a lot more information other than just a synopsis. This is a bonus because it would give detailed information about the characters, quotes, reviews, discussions and more.

Booklikes was okay, it was just difficult to navigate and took me a long time to figure out how to import books from another URL. You have to save from another book community your book list to your computer as a CSV file but my computer would not read it. Then I had to save it as an Excel spreadsheet and then upload it. Once its uploaded it looks great on your shelf. This is one of the most eye appealing book communities. I like that it has a blog, dashboard and timeline connected together in one place. The major drawback is that it only offers ratings and reviews when choosing a book.

LibraryThing was very easy to use and import book lists. All I had to do was copy the URL and past it into the right place and they were there. I did have to go in and switch each one to the correct shelf by clicking the "set collections" icon. Sometimes it didn't work and I had to open the "edit book" button to complete the task, that was troublesome. Some things I liked were the groups, talks, local events, stats links to everything and more information. Even though I said this was a good thing it can be information overload. The major advantage is that it can search for a book in over 700 sources.

I think that I would encourage the use of Shelfari in the classroom and library. There are two main reasons, ease of use and amount of information provided. This will be easy for students to add books to their shelves, rate and review them with minimum difficulty. Teachers, students and librarians can look at all the information provided for the book (characters, setting, theme, reviews, ratings, etc) to understand it better before, during and after they read it. They can even join groups to discuss the book with others. Overall, Shelfari will be my choice for to promote books in my library.