On Goodreads

Last year, my friend, Mark, introduced me to one of the cleverest websites I know. Most of you probably know Goodreads, but for anyone else, let me explain (or rather, let Goodreads do so) :

Goodreads is the largest social network for readers in the world. We have more than 4,500,000 members who have added more than 120,000,000 books to their shelves. A place for casual readers and bona-fide bookworms alike, Goodreads members recommend books, compare what they are reading, keep track of what they've read and would like to read, form book clubs and much more. Goodreads was launched in December 2006. 

A network for readers sounded like my thing. Thus, I then spent a considerable amount of time plotting in all the books I could remember having read (not nearly as many as I'd imagined, so either my memory fails me or I'm not as avid a reader as I like to think). The networking part of Goodreads isn't necessarily all that effective, at least not to me. After a year I now have about 40 "friends" - most of which are contacts I'd already made here in the blogosphere. Also, I don't visit often enough to actually make it very useful, and when I do I hardly participate in any interaction (other than the occasional comments on friend's reviews). 


However, I still really, really like it. I guess the idea of a website devoted entirely to books has an enormous appeal to me. Further, keeping track of what I read (and more importantly, what I don't read) has a positive effect on me: I've long felt I don't read as much as I'd liked (and used to), but with a website tracking my progress I at least feel some "pressure" to pick up a book rather than turn on the TV... 


In the end, though, the real appeal (to me) of Goodreads is the opportunity to find new reads, get recommendations and find books or authors I otherwise would not consider.


Also, if you are the book review-posting type (which I'm not really, since my reviews tend to drift off into somethingelseness), Goodreads have excellent templates for this, which makes it easy to copy&paste into your blog. Since I have committed to the whole A-Z thing this month, I have decided to re-use a couple of my Goodreads reviews (even if I do stray off the main topic...), so you'll have ample examples of how that can be done (check back in on "P" and "T").  


For all these good reasons, I have vowed to myself to be more active on Goodreads. I should, for instance, link my account up with this blog. It's on my to-do list...