Shelfari (Beta, of course) is “a virtual shelf to show your books” and “connect with your friends.” It’s an interesting concept and parts of it are well done, although some the limitations in organizing your shelf became apparent soon after I began to add books. It would be great to be able to reorder, or otherwise create categories (in ways other than using opinions or star ratings), but perhaps this is in the works as this site only launched this month.
Our shelf is at: http://www.shelfari.com/Ideum. For now, the books included are those that I thought would be useful for course I’m teaching at UVIC next month (The New Web: Interactive and Collaborative Technologies in the Museum World). I haven’t added much to our shelf in the way of tags or opinions to any of the books in the collection, but it’s a start. It will be interesting to see how things develop with Shelfari and with its closest competitor, the more established LibraryThing.
I’ve been looking at a similar site, called Books We Like: http://www.mediaventure.org/test-bwl-feed.html that does allow tag-based organization of booklists.
URL for the main books we like site: http://www.bookswelike.net/ .
Thanks Craig. I really like Bookswelike. I think it is great that you can decide who is the beneficiary of the commission. It seems pretty likely (although it is not explicitly stated) that Shelfari makes the money from any commisions on their site.
I’ve been really partial to LibraryThing. It doesn’t seem as graphically rich but the UI is seamless and really makes the drudgery of typing in ISBN numbers seem actually fun.
I’ve been contemplating building something like this around vinyl collections for a while. These book and cd initiatives benefit from Amazon, Gracenote, MusicBrainz, and other massive online databases….I’ll be curious to see how collection databases like this grow into areas where the data doesn’t really exist digitally yet.
Oh yeah for an example you can see my librarything collection
Bryan,
LibraryThing certain has more to offer. It’s seems better for organizing books. Shelfari seems to have strong visual impact and it was really easy to get started. We’ll have to see if they improve their features.
Yeah its definitely more fun to browse through your books on Shelfari.
I’m the lead visual designer for Shelfari, and stumbled across your blog post just now. After reading your feedback I wanted to say a big thanks for checking us out, and also let you know that we recently added a new feature along the lines of what you were hoping for. You can now create reading lists, wish lists, top ten lists of your books, etc. Hope you’ll check it out. Great shelf, and thanks again for your feedback! -Ian
Ian,
That was fast! We’re very much looking forward to using the new features. I’ll let you know what the participants in my course UVIC think, we’ll be adding some more books and comments to the shelf.
Jim
[...] The list is fairly exhaustive but surprisingly there’s no mention of LibraryThing, Shelfari (which we wrote about recently, Our new (Beta) bookshelf on Shelfari), and Whatsonmybookshelf. Also missing is BlueDot (social bookmarking), JumpCut (video editing), and Splice (audio editing). Still there must be over 100 sites here many that I’ve never come across. As someone who observed the first Internet bubble up- close in San Francisco, I’m finding the proliferation of Web 2.0 sites just as remarkable. Yesterday Business Week ran an article, Bubble 2.0? in it a longtime venture investor, Todd Dagres suggest a 1% success rate, “For every one that works, another 100 will fail.” I guess we’ll find out soon enough if he’s right. [...]