With nearly six million members in its community, 5-year-old Goodreads has become the best social network for readers online. The website is a clean, well-lighted, intuitively designed place. Sign-up is free right on the site or through your Google account. Membership is unencumbered by loyalty to its bookselling partners. After registering, you can start placing books on your shelves by choosing from Goodreads’ 100 most commonly shelved books, which will immediately present themselves to you. You can also search for titles and authors to add, or import a file or an Amazon wish list. The whole process is easy and fun.
Once you’ve connected with your friends, you’ll see their recent activities every time you log in and, if you wish, you can connect with their friends. Try this for fun: on your “Friends” page, compare your book list to someone else’s. You’ll see a blue circle representing your books overlapping a green one representing theirs, plus the number of books you’ve read in common. Or take the book compatibility test to gauge how closely your ratings match with your friends’ ratings on any of the site’s most commonly shelved titles.
As of September 15, 2011, Goodreads uses your ratings, among other data, to recommend books you could add to your shelves. According to the site’s blog, the newly acquired recommendation engine analyzes readers’ ratings, genres, and shelf names to derive a multifaceted profile for every title in its database. Based on every title on your shelves, dozens more are suggested on your new “Recommendations” page. For instance, I’ve given The Secret Self Vol. I, a short-story anthology edited by Hermione Lee, all 5 stars and placed it on two shelves: the default “read” shelf (as in, “I have read it”) and a customized “desert-island choice” shelf I created for my favorite books of all time. Goodreads suggests 18 short-story collections I might also enjoy, from Jim Henson’s ‘The Storyteller’ by Anthony Minghella (published in 1988) to last year’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li.
Each suggestion is categorized by genre and accompanied by detailed information, including “Because you added … .” Hover your cursor over this link, and it identifies the particular book on your shelves which inspired that particular recommendation. To narrow or further customize this list, simply click the “add to my books” button or “Not interested.” The more books you and your friends rate, categorize, and choose from your recommendation lists, the more personalized your suggested next reads.
Like all networking sites, Goodreads easily becomes addictive – what with its bells and whistles, its lists and widgets, its neverending quizzes and other shiny goodies. Luckily, the recommendation feature takes us back to the whole point of the site: to read and share books we’ve enjoyed. Click anywhere on my widget to visit Goodreads.
