Grappling with Goodreads

I've just spent a week reading Teens, Libraries , and Social Networks: What librarians Need to Know edited by Agosto and Abbas (2011). In it were two seperate chapters on engaging students in Social networking around Young Adult Literature. Over and over the book-sharing social networks Goodreads, Shelfari and LibraryThing were mentioned. I decided to check out Goodreads as it was meant to have added extras for authors.
   Well, what a blast! I've never had so much nerdy fun. It was easy to login through Facebook and to start rating the books I'd read. (Now how often as librarians do we consciously get to go through hundreds of books and rate them, as if anyone cared?) Well this site asks you to do it so that it can generate an idea of what type of books to recommend for you. I really don't think the program has this down pat though. A lot of the books they recommended to me was stuff I'd never go near because it was too trashy for my tastes. This brings me back to the topic of tagging items. How can a computer program plug into the aesthetic whims of the reader and provide similar titles? Neal Wyatt touched on this issue in one of the readings we had to do for Module 4.
   This problem was amplified when I created my own shelf called 'Island books'. The program had obviously never considered sorting books in such a way and it threw all sorts of riciculous options at me when recommending new Island Book titles.
   I joined a few groups so that I could see what sort of threads generate the best discussions. This was quite easy to do, just by clicking on the groups tab and following the prompts. However other aspects of the site weren't so intuitive. For instance it stated that I could follow different authors. OK, so how was I to do this? It took me over an hour of fiddling around to discover that I needed to highlight the author's name, whereby I would be sent to the author's profile page and that's where I could become a fan, or indeed a friend.
   I then decided to sign up for the special tool for authors. It took me a while to find the tab for this in small print at the bottom of the home page. Once there I had to apply to be accepted to the program. I did this and received notification the next morning. I had to then fill out my author profile which is always an irritatingly self-centred activity. Soon I will be able to add widgets to my blog and other helpful links. It's all a matter of continuing to play around with the platform. And guess what? I love it. I think I've found the almost perfect social networking platform for bibliophiles/authors combined.


Burns, E. (2011). Fandom as a form of social networking. Teens, Libraries and Social Networking: What Librarians Need to Know. Libraries Unlimited.

Hilburn, J. (2011). Using social networking sites to connect teens with young adult literature. Teens, Libraries , and Social Networking: What Librarians Need to Know. Libraries Unlimited.

Wyatt, N (2009). Large-scale tagging projects outside libraries put users at the center and offer a model for readers' advisory. Library Journal, 10/15/2009