Quite a while ago I stumbled upon social networks for books or rather their readers. I quite liked the idea because they trive to understand what kind of books you like and find books that you might be interested in using that information. Yeah, it’s similar to what Amazon does but with the advantage of not being limited to a certain site or rather retailer. Another nice feature are virtual bookshelves which display all of your books or your wishlist if you want to. You can also track books you read but don’t own. Obviously, you can explore other users shelves, find people with similar tastes and discover books they liked that might interest you too. All in all, it sounds quite absorbing.

There’s one problem though. There are, like for any other modern web service, dozens of sites out there basically offering the same. Which one should I go for? Well, I just looked up which ones are most popular right now, which turned out to be Goodreads, Shelfari and LibraryThing. The look of LibraryThing didn’t appeal to me at all so I ended up signing up to Goodreads and Shelfari. I’ll give them both a thorough try for a couple of weeks and decide on one (or none if I find them to be less useful than I thought) then. You will be able to read up on my experiences with both services right here.

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