Reading may not be the first thing you think about when you stop surfing the Web, but for book lovers the social network has been a godsend, helping them discover new authors and books that they’d never find in their local bookstore.

Shelfari, a readers’ social network, was recently acquired by Amazon.com, so we expect it will be a hotspot, gaining a lot of new features in coming months. At this time, it is not the most engaging of the book social sites because it forces a lot of browsing before providing surprising information. It does, however, give users the ability to drop “widgets,” self-contained software that can be pasted into a web page or blog, that helps them engage with other readers and, even, earn some money.

Shelfari’s main feature is the bookshelf, where members can list the books they own. It’s a simple matter of entering the book’s title or the author’s name and clicking an “add to my shelf” button. A picture of the book cover is added to your shelf, you can add your review of the book and ask the community for their recommendations. The “add review” tool is a bit hidden, as you have to click through to the Reviews section and then find a small text link to create your own review.

Books can be rated, tagged (to help others categorize or find the book) and, for some reason, it is also possible to edit the book tile and ISBN numbers–this seems like a little bit of overkill in hopes of being more community-friendly.

Once you add friends, their reading lists become available to help you discover new books. The site doesn’t really do a great job of introducing new titles, because it lists what people are currently reading on the home page, but that doesn’t really constitute a recommendation, as there is no matching of your interests with those listed. You must search around the site, until you find the “Just For You” lists, which show people with similar reading lists. Friend lists provide greater context, but for our time entering books we didn’t get that much value.

The main consideration to keep in mind with any book site, or any site that provides recommendations based on what you currently purchase, is the complexity of adding your list of products. If the site doesn’t give you an easy way to import titles, you’re going to do a lot of work before you get value. (Shelfari’s import tools are well hidden, so here’s the link). Shelfari did not do a good job of importing books from other reading sites, though it does find books listed in your blog and import them onto your bookshelf.

Shelfari’s groups are more active than many of the reading sites reviewed. They are difficult to discover, since the site doesn’t make recommendations based on what you read. The site also lets users query the whole community for feedback about a book, so if you are wondering whether you’ll enjoy a book the community might be able to tell you. The odd thing, we found, was that the requests listed on our home page were consistenly weeks old. It seems that they would be more recent if the feature were really useful.

Home Page: Shelfari
A reader’s social network that provides extensive group discussion of books.

Tags: books, friend lists, reading, tagging, widgets

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 9th, 2008 at 6:14 pm and is filed under Social Site Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.