dale lane

I’m rubbish at choosing books to read, so recommendations from friends who are better read than I am are very useful. I enjoy using last.fm as a way to discover new music that I might like, so thought I’d look to see if you could get the same for books.

I’ve found two sites that I quite like:

goodreads
This is a lovely site. Track the different books you have read, and are reading. Sort them into different “bookshelves” if you want to group them.

It’s got a ton of RSS feeds, and it’s focus absolutely seems to be to make it easier to track what your friends have read and are reading, what they like and don’t like.

As with all social sites though, how useful it is does depend on how much of your social network you can bring with you! Unfortunately, I don’t know anyone else who uses the site yet, so I can only follow myself. And I already said that I make lousy recommendations to myself! 🙂

In the meantime, their public timeline is pretty good – even short reviews from strangers is a good way to come across interesting new stuff.

The site design is very pretty, and I love the “covers” view for bookshelves – the image above is a screenshot of my current bookshelf. (Although, as with the RSS feeds, there are different ways to sort and view the bookshelves.)

And friendfeed have added good support for sharing your reading list with your wider social network. (That’s how I came across goodreads in the first place, actually – from the list of supported services on friendfeed.)

what should I read next?
This site has the recommendation engine that I wish goodreads had. The idea is that you give it a list of books, and it takes that list – comparing it with the lists others have submitted, to come up with a list of recommendations. Very last.fm.

And the recommendations seem pretty good, too!

But, the site isn’t pretty. There aren’t any pictures, or pretty backgrounds.

And it doesn’t have any RSS feeds. And there’s no system for tracking or following your friends. All the recommendations are generalised and anonymous.

In fact, the login only needs an email address, and needs no password. (So if you know my email address and felt particularly inclined, you could go and vandalise my list to your heart’s content – please don’t!). This means I’m reluctant to link directly to my page here, as there isn’t a distinction between my view of my list of books and a public view – it’s the same thing. Any site which makes me reluctant to share my info isn’t on to a great start.

It’s such a shame – because the recommendation engine does seem to be very clever.

Please sign up! 🙂
I’ll have to try and arm-twist some friends who read interesting books to try and sign up to goodreads – there are a bunch of people I can think of that I’d love to follow. And if you do sign-up, please do add me as a friend!

Tags: books, friendfeed, goodreads, last.fm, reading, reading list

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 8:30 am and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.