Shelfari: Catalog Your Library

As with most of my recent posts, this one will explain an online social network, in particular one used for book lovers. After getting this blog up and running and attempting to use it in order to share my interests and the things I believe to be important, I began to get the idea that one of the more important parts of me are the books that I read in my spare time and decided I needed a way to put them up for everyone to see. It was at this point that I started searching for online applications that could perform this task for me. I found three such services, LibraryThing, aNobii, and Shelfari.

The first was LibraryThing, which is incredibly intensive with more than 17 million books registered and access to over 80 libraries including Amazon.com and the Library of Congress. Although it had the best ability to track your books, it was the ugliest of the three websites and not necessarily the most intuitive or well set up. The biggest drawback to this site and that which made me decide not to go with it, is the fact that after logging 200 books for free you have to pay a 25 dollar one time fee for life to register any more. Although 25 dollars is not a lot of money, it is certainly more than either aNobii or Shelfari, which are both free not matter how many books you catalog over your life.

The next one that I found was aNobii which allows cataloging your books and putting them into several categories. It was also extensive in its search capabilities, looked better than LibraryThing, however, I felt the site was simply to busy and a bit to hectic for my tastes.

Finally, I was led to Shelfari, which was named as one of the 10 most beautiful online social networks and was very user friendlier and not cluttered by any unneccessary links and advertisements on the sidebar. It also allows to put your books onto your shelf, your current reading list, your favorites, and my favorite, the wish list. This lets people quickly see the difference between books you have finished, books you are reading, and books you hope someone might get you so that you may read them in the future.