Subclassed

26 August 2008

Shelfari bought by Amazon

I just noticed this blog post; so Amazon finally bought one of the new wave of literary social-networking sites I recently listed. I wonder whether they'll now do with Shelfari the sort of thing I suggested for aNobii.

I guess this might be a blow for LibraryThing, GoodReads and aNobii (but it might actually be the kiss of death for Shelfari if it's reduced to an Amazon shopwindow). However, as these things go, we might now see a move from an Amazon competitor to buy or partner with one of the other services.

Me, I don't care: the only service with a serious API is GoodReads, so I'll stick with it :)

Labels: amazon, anobii, GeekDiary, goodreads, shelfari

posted by GiacomoL @ 3:58 PM 0 comments links to this post

16 August 2008

Tag your f***ing books!

After a few days wandering around "literary" social-networking sites, I'm feeling a bit frustrated by how people interpret their participation in a very solipsistic way. Listing your own books is half the fun, I get it, but certainly the other half is hooking up with other like-minded bookworm geeks; you should put in a little effort to make your shelf accessible to them. Why then few can be bothered to tag their books? Without tags, I'm left to dig through hundreds of items I don't care about, whereas even a little classification (like separating novels and non-fiction, or fantasy and contemporary) would go a long way to help me define that you like the same sort of harrypotterish works I (might or might not) enjoy.

So please, if you are serious about this sort of sites, try to tag your books, even a little bit. Splitting your shelf in groups containing less than 100 items would already be enough, especially if your collection contains 200+ editions of books blatantly plagiarizing JRR Tolkien.

Labels: anobii, books, GeekDiary, goodreads, librarything, personal, shelfari

posted by GiacomoL @ 5:54 PM 0 comments links to this post

14 August 2008

"Which social-literary networking site should I choose?"

After a few days wasted switching between various sites, I have to pick one (or two, max) and stick with it, so I tried to determine which one had more chances to survive in the long run.

Data from Compete.com seems to say that GoodReads is winning the battle on literary social networking.

Librarything, despite a huge head-start (years), seems to be in decline, even though attention data suggests that the remaining members spend a bit more time on the site than the average GR member.

Note how aNobii seems to be such a minor player, even though it's the dominant application in Italy and probably lists more books than its competitors; I wonder if Compete's data is skewed towards US/UK visitors. It has to be said that aNobii is showing more velocity though, so it will be interesting to see how things fare in a few months.

Shelfari is also in the mix, still below Librarything but growing fast. The site is very well presented, but I hated that it used Yet Another Format to import books (apparently, more oriented to listing the condition of your books, which I guess has to be expected from a site backed by ABEbooks), and I couldn't be bothered to try it.

Labels: anobii, books, GeekDiary, librarything, shelfari, web2.0

posted by GiacomoL @ 8:44 AM 2 comments links to this post

Meh

Shelfari: "If you exported your file from another site and Shelfari failed to import your library and if the file has a different extension than .txt, please change the file extension to .txt."

... because we are too lazy to do it for you.

Labels: books, GeekDiary, shelfari