Task : GoodReads

Next up on the task list...joining GoodReads. So I joined up and have been enjoying working my way around the site. It's a pretty fun way to get book suggestions and read reviews by every day readers. As you enlarge your "friends" circle, you can see what books you have in common and their thoughts on what they have been reading. It's also possible to just take a look at what books are most popular/unpopular on the site as a whole. It's a fun site, but to really get engaged takes work as you need to enter quite a bit of information about your own reading habits to really get the most out of it.

I'm already a member of LibraryThing and to be honest, I think that I prefer that site to GoodReads. The biggest drawback to LibraryThing is that to enter more than 200 books, you have to have a paid membership but the fees are relatively low. But in return, I find that the cataloging is more fun - you can pick the standard catalog entry used by Amazon.com for an item or you have the ability to enter your own MARC cataloging (for non-librarians MARC refers to Machine-Readable Cataloging - a library standard). Additionally, it's easier to search for groups that you might be interested in joining and I like their book suggester which generates book recommendation lists based on a title or author.