If you love books...

I've just joined a fun site that Barbara told me about. It's a social networking site based around books, Shelfari. Everything books: reading, discussions, rating, reviewing, etc. You can keep track of what you've read, what you plan to read and share with your friends what you are currently reading. I also found a similar site called Goodreads, which I've started a bookshelf on too.

Each has its strong points, and I haven't completely decided which I prefer yet. Although I've added more books to Shelfari, I suspect Goodreads may be more intuitive. I definitely prefer the ease of rating books on Goodreads (similar to rating a movie on Netflix) as well as the ability to create different "shelves" than the standard ones. Goodreads also lets the user keep track of when they read the book and Shelfari, though, makes it possible to tag books with various labels. I haven't figured out how to do that on Goodreads. Both sites allow the user to write opinions of the books on their shelves and both have book discussions and groups though Goodread's discussion section is very new.

Anyways, just thought I'd tell you about the fun new toy. Feel free to check out my bookshelf on Shelfari (or on Goodreads, but I think I'll finish building up the Shelfari one, which I still have a lot to do on, before I start that). My username is rahime on both sites... That has got to be just about the only advantage of having such a "unique" name.

p.s. I just noticed that the goodreads site is down, I hope it comes back.