I have been a member of LibraryThing since May 2007 and have paid to be a lifetime member. I have a personal account, one I used to add books for a webpage at work, and one I use for storytime books. I like LibraryThing because I can use all the tags I want, they are easy to search and manipulate, and there were sections for public and private comments.
I joined Goodreads in April 2008 from a friend request and use it as a social book sharing thing. I enjoy getting and reading the reviews from friends. My favorite friend is my 13-year old niece who lives in another state. We also send messages to each other occasionally. She is a prolific reader and posts often and I am now friends with a couple of her friends and now get some strange group invitations and poll requests. It’s been great to see ratings by teen on teen books. Mostly I just see the ratings of other youth and teen librarians. I have a Goodreads widget on facebook and on my personal blog. It is a flash widget and WordPress doesn’t support it so I can’t add it here.
I do keep both and often copy/paste my comments into both. I have many more tags on LibraryThing and use it more for work related searching and didn’t want to transfer everything I had to Goodreads. Goodreads is mainly a social thing for me.
I looked at the Shelfari site but don’t need another social site since my friends are on Goodreads.
I decided to explore the recommendation areas on LibraryThing for this assignment. While it was tricky at first, as in takes a while to figure out how the recommendations got there and how to find them, I think it has the potential to be a useful tool. I didn’t agree with some of the read-alikes and many are just titles in a same general age category, there were some that seemed perfect. Recommendations can be found on every book’s page. Members can make recommendations and it was good to see that there are ‘rules’ or at least suggested rules.
Tags: Goodreads, LibraryThing
