Shelfari: A Social Network For Book Lovers
As a long time bibliophile I’ve tried just about every book-related site out there, my favorite remains LibraryThing, but lately I’ve been playing around with Shelfari. Shelfari launched back in October and has since developed a relatively strong following.
Shelfari is a social network that revolves around books and has an attractive, easy-to-use interface whose design and layout are vaguely reminiscent of the popular Mac software Delicious Library.
Speaking of Delicious Library, Shelfari allows you to upload your Delicious Library info as a text file which means you don’t have to input excessive amounts of data (a similar function is available for LibraryThing exports).
If you don’t have your book data already in some malleable digital form, you’ll have to enter it by hand or search to see if other users have already input your favorite books. You can search for books by title, author, ISBN or subject.
There’s all the familiar trappings of social networks, profiles, tagging, friends, recommendations, and more (if I had a dollar for every time I’ve typed that sentence…).
Shelfari also takesa tip from Digg offering a number of most-popular lists like “Top Books,” “Top Tags,” “Most Opinions” and “Top Shelves” to help you find books that might pique your interest.
Shelfari lets you create separate book shelves for books you’ve read, books you own and books you plan to read. Your books are displayed, as you might expect, on a bookshelf and above each cover image (pulled from Amazon) are links to friends opinions and other review data. Each book also has a direct link for purchasing via Amazon, which is part of Shelfari’s revenue stream.
Unlike LibraryThing which charges an annual fee for users that want to list over 200 books, Shelfari is free regardless of the size of your book collection.
Overall I liked Shelfari, it has a simple and slick interface an it’s easy to add books to your listing. At the same time, something about Shelfari put me off a bit, perhaps it’s too slick.
Shelfari is a bit like a meat-space Borders or Barnes and Noble, clean, organized and well lit, whereas LibraryThing is bit more like a local bookshop, it’s run by one person, it’s a bit musty, there’s dust in the corners and the lighting isn’t perfect, but it has a genuine community feel that Shelfari lacks.
Then there’s Shelfari’s misguided decision to refer to users as “Shelfarians.”
My search for the perfect book cataloguing service isn’t over yet. What I’d really like is a site that offers a robust API —like the Flickr API— anyone have any suggestions?
