I’m a big fan of Visual Bookshelf, by Living Social, which is a Facebook (and stand alone) application that allows users to search for and display books they are reading in real life.
Moreover, it allows for categorisation of books into ‘Already Read’, ‘Reading Now’ and ‘Want to Read’. The marketing part of the application also allows users to select whether they ‘Own’ or ‘Want to Own’ each listed book. Users can rate books, write reviews, and view other users that also have that book listed.
It has also come in handy for ‘recommending’ to my husband which books I might like to receive for my birthday - he just logged into my Facebook and selected a couple from my ‘Want to Read’ list. How romantic.
The only issue I had with Visual Bookshelf was that it was not embeddable…until now. Check out my new page on this blog for My Bookshelf. The widget doesn’t embed in the sidebar very well, so I’ve just given it its own page. That keeps my home page uncluttered too.
I know many others are using Shelfari, which has similar features, but as I’ve gone to the effort of listing and reviewing over 400 books, I’m not quite ready to jump into Shelfari as well! Perhaps if they add an ‘import’ feature I’ll be more receptive.
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April 30th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Nice post: I love lists and use last.fm for all my music ’scrobbling’. But for books I use Goodreads at http://www.goodreads.com/ I don’t think it’s got a huge user take-up yet, but it’s pretty easy to add a book and has a nice interface.
May 4th, 2008 at 3:02 am
Hey thanks for stopping by my blog. I use visual book shelf on Facebook, but I use Library Thing, because like you I can’t be bothered to transfer things around. I just wish Library thing would make a Facebook App already.
I did a quick scan of your books and while I have herd of many of them, we do have a few in common. Guerrilla Warfare by Che and Bukowski.Not a bad match. Check out some of my titles as well….
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/intrepidflame