The Paisano®

Social Networks for Book Worms February 15, 2008

Yes, even book lovers have their own social networks these days. The two best sites appear to be Shelfari and Library Thing. All others don’t stack up (ha ha..er..um sorry).

Here is a quick review:

***New***

BookBump is described as the iTunes for books. The interface is the best around but it doesn’t have all of the web 2.0 sharing features that Shelfari and others are offering. Still, if all you want to do is manage your book collection and you don’t care about sharing book collections with others, then BookBump could be the right service for you.
Here is a screenshot of its excellent user interface for managing your book collection:

***Pai’s Pick***

Shelfari has a nice look and feel and offers many features all for free. Your book collection is displayed cleverly on a virtual bookshelf (hence the name).

There are several types of collections or shelves you can create:

• Books I’ve Read
• Book I’m Reading
• Books I Plan to Read
• Books Owned
• Books Wishlist
• Favorite Books

Another unique feature is the Groups (Book Clubs) you can create or join to discuss and share reviews about different types of books.

You can creature customized widgets to display whatever you want on your blog or website. Here’s an example of my shelf (only two books added thus far):

LibraryThing has a huge amount of book titles to choose from, but their free account limits you to only 200 books. It’s $10 a year for unlimited books which is dirt cheap.
The website itself is nowhere near as impressive as Shelfari and doesn’t offer as many features or types of collections you can keep or share.

Catalog with Amazon, the Library of Congress or 175 other world libraries. Import from anywhere. Get recommendations. Tag your books and explore others’ tags. Put your books on your blog. Enter 200 books for free, as many as you like for $10 (year) or $25 (life).

BookMooch is not really a social network for book lovers as the previous two sites are. What it really offers is a bartering/trading system where readers can exchange books to earn points which they can use to get more books to read. The service is free with the only costs involved are the shipping fees to mail books to other members, who will return the favor (in theory). Interesting concept, sort of a NetFlix for books.

SwapTree is similar to BookMooch in that you can swap books but it also allows you to exchange other items such as Music, DVDs, and games!