Comparing Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing

Comparing Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing

There has been a lot of reaction to the announcement that Amazon is buying Goodreads, an independent review site.

When I first heard about it, I speculated a bit that they might shut down Shelfari (another social reading site which Amazon owns), and fold it into Goodreads.

However, I also said I wanted to investigate Goodreads more, and my hope now is that they don’t do that without combining features.

The two of them actually function quite differently…as does LibraryThing. Amazon owns Abebooks, which has, I think, a 40% stake in LibraryThing…but LT has emphatically said that they are not owned by Amazon, which I think is a reasonable interpretation.

I wanted to go through here and compare the three. This isn’t to say that you (or Amazon) have to pick one…you can use all three. Right now, though, that would mean entering your books into each of them (although there is some possibility of importing), so you’d have to think about it.

With any site with a social factor, you also have to consider the “social capital” you have to spend on it to be a “good citizen”. That’s why I don’t use Facebook: I know I couldn’t expand my energy and attention to the point where I wouldn’t anger people with non-responsiveness there. I already have “real life”, my job, this blog, my other writings, and the Amazon forums. People who e-mail me realize, I hope, that I won’t always get back to them quickly. Being on Facebook, too? I just don’t have the bandwidth.

Before I get started, let me say that I’m going to look at different aspects. One key question: do you use the site to catalog and analyze and share what you are already own, or to discover new things to read? You could certainly do both, but my immediate thought for a site like this is the former. I want to catalogue my books, and record information about them. That’s probably not why Amazon bought Goodreads. They clearly want sites like this to drive future sales. Understanding you is helpful in that regard, but they probably don’t care that you put five different versions of the same book on your “shelves” to reflect your paper collections.

That said, let me first give you an overview:

Goodreads.com

“The right book in the right hands at the right time can change the world”

• Members (all numbers per their website): 16 million
• Books added: 525 million
• Reviews: 23 million

Founded by Otis and Elizabeth Chandler, the site has been around for about six years.  The homepage emphasizes three key functions:

• Add friends and see what is on their “shelves”
• Rate books you’ve read to get recommendations
• Add books to your own shelves

Clicking on a book gives you ratings and reviews.

There’s no question that one of the attractions of Goodreads is its sheer size.

Shelfari.com

“read.share.explore.”

Shelfari doesn’t make a lot of their numbers available publicly. It was founded in 2006 by  Josh Hug, Kevin Beukelman, and Mark Williamson, and acquired in 2008 by Amazon.

The homepage has three tabs:

• Profile
• Books
• Community

LibraryThing.com

“What’s on your bookshelf?”

• Members: 1,666,713
• Books: 81,133,380
• Reviews: 2,146,228

Founded in 2005 by Tim Spalding, it’s actually the oldest of the three.

The homepage has

• Profile
• Your Books
• Add Books
• Talk
• Groups
• Local
• More
• Zeitgeist

Next, let’s compare a few specific books. After that,I’ll give you more of my sense of the sites.

A Popular Besteller:

The Hunger Games

I know this isn’t current right now, but it’s in the public consciousness. I also thought it was one where one could expect a lot of activity. I’m just doing the first book, not the series, for the sake of comparison. So, how does each site treat it?

Goodreads

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2767052-the-hunger-games

The average rating is 4.45 out of five stars. There are 1,499,207 ratings and 114,780 reviews.

There is a lot happening on this page!

You can click Stats and see a line graph of activity (how many times it was added, reviewed, and so on) for about the past six months.

They list 146 other editions of it.

You can buy it a variety of places, and look for it in libraries (through a link with WorldCat, which I’ve written about before).

If you’ve designated “friends”, you can see their reviews. You can see public reviews.

You can see lists in which Goodreads users have put it. You can see genres containing it. You can see other recommended reads similar to it.

There is an author profile (and the helpful note that there are other authors listed with the same name).

The reviews often contain pictures…in this case, there was a lot of parody stuff.

There are videos from readers (“It completely took over my life.”) with comments on them.

There are sections for trivia and quotations.

You can share the book through a number of social media.

Certainly,  if you wanted to see if you’d like the book, and you wanted to discuss it, it’s covered here.

Shelfari

http://www.shelfari.com/books/3987702/The-Hunger-Games

Weirdly, I”m not seeing an actual numeric average of the reviews, although I can see that on Amazon. It looks like about 4.5 stars on a scale of 1 to 5.  There are 22, 747 reviews, and I’m told that 110,324 members have it (I can see a list of members by clicking).

The first thing I see are the Book Extras: that’s where you can get a wiki type listing of details. Those sections include

• Description
• Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis
• Summary
• Characters (35 of them listed)
• Popular Covers
• Quotes
• Settings & Locations
• Organizations (in the book)
• First sentence
• Table of Contents
• Glossary
• Themes & Symbolism
• Series & Lists
• Authors & Contributors
• First Edition
• Awards
• Classification
• Notes for Parents
• Subjects
• Popular Tags
• Links to Supplemental Material
• Movie Connections
• More Books Like This
• Books Influenced by This Book
• Books That Cite This Book
• Amazon Customers Who Bought This Book Also Bought

There are also sections which are hidden by default: Errata; Books with Additional Background Information; and Books That Influenced This Book. I’m not quite sure why those are hidden. There is a “hide spoilers” checkbox which is selected by default (I really appreciate that!), but unchecking it didn’t make them show up.

In addition to the Book Extras tab, there are tabs for Readers & Reviews, Discussions, and Editions (Shelfari lists 258 of those).

You can buy the book, but it links just to Amazon or Abebooks (which is part of the Amazon family) for collectible editions.

You can share the book on social media.

There is a sidebar where members can ask questions, and get answers (by people voting yes or no).

Recent editors are shown.

Members, Group, and Lists with this book are linked.

You can read the first chapter for free.

This page has more of the geeky kind of detail about the book I find interesting than the Goodreads page. I’d say that Goodreads feels more modern and more shallow (outside of reviews), and Shelfari feels more scholarly, in a pop culture sort of way.

LibraryThing

http://www.librarything.com/work/4979986

It’s rated 4.43. There are 2,358 reviews, and 29,350 members with the book.

Outside of the cover image, there are no images beyond icons on this page.

I see a ranking of 25 for popularity, but I’m not quite clear what that means. When I clicked on it, it said

“Popularity is position on a rank-ordered list of the number of copies of a works cataloged during a given period.”

It looks like it is the ranking out of the top 100,000. In 2008, The Hunger Games was #1,785: in 2012, it was #2.

I see

• Members
• Tags
• LibraryThing Recommendations
• Member Recommendations
• Will you like it? (I haven’t rated enough books to get that to work yet)
• Member Reviews (in a number of languages…you can narrow by language, which is nice)
• Published Reviews
• Other authors (these are contributors: translators, illustrators)
• Work-to-work relationships (contained in, parodied in, reference guides/companions
• Common Knowledge

Common Knowledge is like the Book Extras at Shelfari. The sections include

• Series (with order)
• Canonical (official) title
• Original title
• Alternative titles
• Original publication date
• People/characters (30 of these)
• Important places
• Important events
• Related movies
• Awards and honors
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• First words
• Quotations
• Last words (with a spoiler screen…click to reveal)
• Disambiguation notice
• Publisher’s editors
• Blurbers (including Stephen King)
• Publisher series

Then there are sections for

• References
• LibraryThing members’ descriptions (amusingly, this includes haiku summaries)
• Book descriptions (including Amazon’s)
• Library descriptions

In the sidebar, there are

• Quicklinks (including purchasing and getting it at the library through WorldCat)
• Current Discussion
• Popular covers (159 listed)
• Ratings (broken down with numbers for each number of stars)
• Audible
• LibraryThing Early Reviewers Alumn (it’s a program where you can get pre-publication copies)
• Is this you? (an author program)
• Advanced

There aren’t as many reviews here, and I would describe the feel of this page as funky. The “Common Knowledge” seems more fun than the Book Extras, but hasn’t been completed as much (a lot of things were blank).

Next, let’s just compare a couple of stats on a

Popular Classic

Pride and Prejudice

I went with one that’s a perennial bestseller. I’m curious as to whether it being an older, public domain titles is going to change how the different sites treat it.

• Goodreads: Rating: 4.23; 942,848 ratings; 27,542 reviews (about 24% the number as The Hunger Games)
• Shelfari: Rating: roughly 4.2; 4,818 reviews (about 21%)
• LibraryThing: Rating: 4.46; 762 reviews (about 32%)

Based on that, LibraryThing seems to be the friendliest to classics.

The Somewhat Obscure

The Platypus of Doom and Other Nihilists

• Goodreads: Rating: 3.5; 20 ratings; 3 reviews
• Shelfari: no reviews or ratings, but the book is listed and eight members have it
• LibraryThing: no reviews, but two ratings (averaging three stars): 38 members have it

Goodreads was the winner there.

Well, that’s actually probably enough for this post! If people are interested, I’ll do another one of these looking at features besides just the book listings.

Feel free to let me and my readers know what you think by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Amazon buys Goodreads

Amazon buys Goodreads

Honestly, it was a bit of a surprise when I got this

Amazon press release

in my e-mail!

I doubt anyone has been talking more about the idea of Amazon getting more social than I have (although it’s possible), but I didn’t really expect them to buy

Goodreads.com

After all, Amazon already bought a readers’ social site:

Shelfari.com

back in 2008 (in the first year of the Kindle, which was released late in 2007).

Shelfari never had the cache that Goodreads does, though, so this is a big deal.

In fact, if this was a major industry, there might be a lot of scrutiny about the “merger”. Yes, there are others out there:

LibraryThing

for one, and earlier this year, I suggested Amazon buy the BookAnd app.

Goodreads reportedly has more than 16 million members…when you think about the total number of “serious readers” in the USA, that’s a really sizable chunk (it wouldn’t surprise me if it is half of the people who buy, oh, more than 100 books a year).

Goodreads wrote about this in a

Goodreads blog post

and there are a couple of interesting things there. One, this means Goodreads is hiring, and two, they want to know what integration you want between your Kindle and Goodreads.

Now, I want to point out that this may not mean a lot of changes at Goodreads (outside of that integration thing). IMDb.com was the best movie reference site on the web (in my opinion) before Amazon bought it, and it still is.

The obvious question for me is, what happens to Shelfari?

I have an account there, and I have used it some. Social sites take a lot of work in you personalizing your use of it (ask the doomed Google Reader what people think when you take something away). Migrating to a new one is like moving to a new school when your are ten years old. It might be a better school, but it’s a still a hard adjustment.

Amazon just could keep running them both, but my guess is that they will migrate Shelfari accounts to Goodreads, and shut down the former eventually.

That’s going to be a bit complicated, because they aren’t the same, but there probably is a lot of duplication of features.

My guess is, though, that this is going to result in a better site for Amazon users. I do think they’ll lose some of the anti-ammys (People who are against Amazon…I just made that one up), but they’ll make up for it with other people.

The acquisition is expected to be complete by the end of June of this year.

I’m looking forward to it, but I know that might not be your reaction. I’ve been a Shelfari user, but not really a Goodreads one (I’m going to start exploring the Goodreads options). Part of that was because you could import your books from Amazon to Shelfari, and I assume they’ll add that to Goodreads later.

I’m also curious about what your involvement with readers’ social sites has been up to this point:

I’m not quite ready to poll about what features you would like this to bring to the Kindle service, but feel free to make suggestions by commenting on this post. I’m particularly interested in what you love about Goodreads.

Thanks to my reader, Ed Foster, for giving me a heads-up on this! I saw the press release first, but it’s always appreciated. Ed linked to this

Publishers Weekly article

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

BookScout app introduced…by traditional publisher

BookScout app introduced…by traditional  publisher

As I’ve written before, I think Amazon should get a lot more social on the e-book side.

Books should be as much a part of our lives as TV shows or songs. That’s going to be a bit controversial to say, I know. For many people, books (certainly some books) are an intimate, private thing. I recently wrote about whether or not it was good that strangers can’t see what you are reading when you are using an EBR (E-Book Reader).

However, in a world in which people freely share personal details that would have previously only been seen in their medical records, there are many folks who want to share what they are reading.

I think part of that is that we have to interact with and through technology so much that we want there to be a human side to it. If you had to sit down to spreadsheets for eight hours in a day (not that spreadsheets can’t be fun) with no possibility of that time including human beings, you’d be much less likely to do it. If you can do a quick e-mail, chat, or even just see strangers on YouTube, it much more closely fits what we Homo sapiens are comfortable doing.

I’ve had those conversations with employers who want to block all access to the internet (and personal phone calls) when employees are working. In my opinion, that’s a huge mistake. If people consider their “personal lives” part of their work lives, and vice versa, they’ll spend a lot more time on work. If you spend half an hour a day at work on family and friends, I can pretty much guarantee you that you will spend more than half an hour a day on work when you are at home. If a company draws a hard and fast line, the employee may not want to spend any time at home on work.

So, if we want to be social while we are doing other things online, I think it’s natural.

Companies can work with that truth, and make book reading (and therefore buying) part of our social lives and vice versa.

Let me give you an example (that some of you will likely reflexively hate).

When I managed a brick and mortar bookstore, and especially when I was a customer in many of them, there would be times when conversations would begin in an aisle. One person might ask another person for advice on making a choice, or maybe say, “Oh, I love that author! Have you tried this one?” I’m sure that lifelong friendships (and romantic relationships) were begun that way.

Of course, you didn’t start taking to someone until you had checked out their body language to see that they would be okay with it.

What if, while you were shopping for a book on Amazon, you had the option to chat with someone else looking at the same (or similar, but that would be more difficult) book at the same time? That person would have to have chosen to be visible. Maybe you would see that there were two hundred people looking at that same book at the same time. Perhaps you could see where they were geographically located, and you might see them making comments (like overhearing them in a store). You could chose to privately or publicly chat with them.

You would see their screen names (like we do in the Amazon forums). If they wanted that to be their real names (I use mine), that’s fine, but it could be something else, which might indicate an interest in common with yours (“PlatypusOfDoomFan42″, “NutsAboutKnitsInMacedonia”).

I think people would spend more time hanging out at Amazon…just as they spent time (sometimes every day) in my brick and mortar bookstore.

Would there be risks? Sure. It’s easier to pretend to be someone else online for nefarious purposes. Might somebody spam you? You bet. It’s the exact same risks we have in the Amazon forums, and there are methods to report “abuse” which could be similarly used.

One way to do deal with that would be to have, as I have recommended, “circles of friends”…maybe “book buddies”? “Kindle Klubs?” that you have previously designated, and only see them.

That’s just one idea.

Random House, which has often led the way among tradpubs (traditional publishers), is releasing an app tomorrow called BookScout.

The New York Times article

I think this was the standout quotation for me:

“The app is the culmination of months of work by Random House’s digital marketplace development group.”

See? A tradpub with a “digital marketplace development group”. While I suspect they may not be eating lunch at the same table as editors who have been there for decades I think that’s a sign that some tradpubs will figure out the new market and do just fine.

It’s also important to note that this isn’t just an app about Random House books…it will include discovery for books from other publishers.

That’s another key point for me in business: you don’t have to eliminate the competition if you can grow the overall market. More people reading is good for Random House (as long as it maintains decent marketshare), even if they are sometimes reading books from other people. Social interactivity can increase the penetration of books into our lives…a “rising tide that floats all books”, so to speak.

Will I be using the new Random House app?

Nope…it’s Facebook dependent, and I don’t use Facebook. I have nothing against Facebook (the third largest country in the world by population), it’s just that I have this feeling it would be like taking on another full time job for me.

Amazon could increase discovery among Amazon customers…and all of their customers already are that.

What do you think? Are you going to use the Random House app? Is your reading experience already social enough, thank you very much? Have you ever started a relationship (of any kind) with a stranger from meeting in a bookstore? Should Amazon have their own “bookstore clerks” who are available for live chat on the product pages? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.

Update: thanks to reader and frequent commenter Tom Semple for pointing out an error in this post which has now been corrected.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.