LibraryThing can be more intimidating, its wealth of information necessitating and populating many fields all over the screen. If I had to choose a word to sum up each, I’d call Goodreads “simple” and LibraryThing “robust.” Goodreads’ interface is clean, appealing and fairly self-explanatory, and the conceits of social networking have been widely disseminated, so the bar to new user entry is low. Still, it’s more than possible to use them in a very similar way. That gives you the basic difference between the sites in a nutshell: GR is centered on the social aspects, LT is centered on your books. By default, the next item down is your recently added books. Its customizable home page, recently revamped, gives pride of place to a search-box that searches your own library of books. It’s centered around the collection of book data, and social networking has only gradually colonized it – as noted in “Against Friendship”, it originally had only ‘Interesting Libraries’ and ‘Private watchlist’ and now has ‘Friends’ as well. Its home page is familiar to users of networks like Facebook – a log of the recent books added, reviews posted, “friendships” established by your friends on the site. Goodreads was designed as a social networking site for book-cataloging. It captures data on my books – to kibbitz over with my Mom at her yearly-book-tabulation time, to keep track of books borrowed or lent, et cetera.
It’s helped me develop a practice of summarizing my thoughts on each book I read, which made annotating my grad school reading easy and has, I feel, made my opinions on books sharper and better expressed.It allows me to access my friends’ opinions (or at least star-ratings) on books when I need them – when I’m trying to buy Christmas gifts at 2 am, for example.It reminds me to go read instead of messing with the internet.Everyone’s intentions vary, but for me the benefits have been: The first thing to address is, why use a book cataloging website at all? Since this discussion is predicated on my use patterns and preferences, it’s only fair to set them out. But it’s ridiculous enough to use two, so I haven’t tried any others. Now, I do realize there are other book-cataloging websites – many. I thought it was time to revisit the topic and really dig into the pros and cons of the two sites. I first mentioned my two book-cataloging affiliations in the “Against Friendship” social networking post:įrom there, I also got into LibraryThing, which sadly seems to be superior but is not getting the new membership gestalt goodreads is.