Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Thing 29, Book-based social networks

I am glad I started this weeks ago because if I was just trying to get this done at the last minute I would be having problems. I tried three different book-based social networks. 2 through FB -- Visual Bookshelf and WeRead and GoodReads as a stand alone website.

I used Visual Bookshelf to track the books I read aloud to my kids. It was kind of fun to look for the books and add them. I found it a bit annoying to rate them and comment so I didn't always do that. I was able to turn off the posting to FB which is good as that would be way annoying.

I used WeRead to track my book club's books. It seemed similar to Visual Bookshelf within FB.

With GoodReads I did my personal reading. I was not able to turn off all the FB notifications and ended up doing many postings without realizing it when I was filling out the what I had read questions. I did not like that aspect of GoodReads.

They were all fairly similar. If I was actually trying to track my books for each of these groups I would spend a little more time evaluating what kind of books I wanted to track in each program. They all have issues with multiple editions -- worse than a library catalog -- they need FRBR!!!

I have found it interesting to see what some of my FB friends read or have liked but I generally find it annoying to track my books -- I have only ever been able to remember to write things down for short periods of time. I can see keeping track of what I read aloud to my kids as useful to others -- what is good to read aloud and what is not so good. And it is useful to track my book club reads but I do that in other ways.

These programs offer interesting social interaction and doing through books is a good way. I love that so many people are interested in books and reading -- but I am not that interested in using them.

I am less certain about how to use these at the library. I can see having spaces in our catalogs to allow for comments and discussion would be a good thing. And I'd like to develop that more but I am not certain that these current networks are the way to do it.