Social Media for Booklovers

The other day I mentioned two book-related social media platforms I use: GoodReads (faithfully) for logging the books I’ve read, and LibraryThing (sporadically) for cataloging the books we own.

I’ve experimented with several other platforms—

• BookGlutton is growing on me. It’s an ebook reader for your browser, with some nifty features built in. You can write notes in the margins, and other people can see these notes and comment back—so just imagine, we could all read a book together and discuss it page by page if we wanted.

For example, if you click on that widget it’ll open to the first page of the book, and there’s a chat window (the TALK button on the left) and a place to write margin notes (the MARK button on the right). Has possibilities, no?

(I’m curious—did the widget add to this page’s download time?)

• BookBalloon—a forum for discussion about books and the arts. Every time I visit I wish I had more time to participate there. Very high caliber of conversation. There’s a monthly book club, author interviews, all sorts of good stuff.

• Readernaut—same concept as GoodReads, I think?

• Reading Trails—a place to create lists of related books, in that rabbit-traily way that appeals to so many of us.

And a few I’ve not yet explored:

• aNobii

• Shelfari (I see the Shelfari widget all over the place; it’s the one that looks like a real bookshelf.)

What have you tried? What’s your favorite way to talk about books online?