It was Abby who first introduced me to Shelfari and also Abby who told me about Good Reads just couple of months ago. (Abby is usually way ahead of the rest of us in terms of that sort of thing.) I have been distracted by much bigger life issues of late so I haven't been spending as much time there as I did initially, but I can say that so far, in my comparison of the two, Good Reads definitely wins. There are several things about the setup that appeal to me more.
One thing is I noticed right away is that it's faster than Shelfari, which is a big plus. At times it seemed to take an eternity adding books on Shelfari. It's also easier to do basic things like tag and classify your books and edit comments or shelves on Good Reads. I have had a lot more success finding the exact book with their search option because I get a bigger variety of results. I guess they have more search engines for finding books than Shelfari has, which is nice for people like me who have a lot of obscure or foreign-bought books. Call me anal, but I like to have the right edition of the book on my shelf. I noticed that there's a way to import your entire bookshelf from Shelfari to Good Reads, which would save me some time, but I haven't figured out how yet. Has anyone done it?
I have perused the GR explore option quite a bit. I love reading the reviews! Which is also probably why I have been too intimidated to write more than one tiny review. I, like Abby, have noticed that the caliber of review writing on Good Reads is pretty high. I wonder if these people have jobs? Maybe they have jobs as reviewers or write synopses of books for magazines and book covers? I used to be much better at that sort of thing, but I'm out of practice, and it never came very quickly. In any case, it's nice to read them--especially when they come from the Fontana group. I really love the fact that I can see what fellow Fontanites are reading and recommending.
I must also confess that I frequently get sucked into the Never-ending Book Quiz. I just pick up where I left off and the next thing I know an entire hour has passed. I wouldn't recommend going too far with it, though. I've noticed that the longer you follow the quiz the weirder the questions get. Some of them aren't even complete questions, just words or phrases with a question mark tagged on like : "Blue bunnies?" HUH?
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2 comments:
How did this entry become so long?
I love that this entry was so long! It makes me feel better about my rambly ones. :)
I very much agree about GoodReads versus Shelfari, for pretty much your exact reasons. I also wonder at these peoples' lives/job situations, who write fabulous reviews on GoodReads. I'm sure that's motivated by my jealousy of their mad skillz, though. Ha. I used to be able to write book reviews, back in my scholarly days, but I seem to have lost that gene somewhere along the way...
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