Week 8: Thing #19

At first, I didn't think I would like Library Thing as much as I like Good Reads. However, after having some time to play around with it, I do think it is a great tool. I entered 4 of my all time favorites and then the book that I had just finished reading. I tagged the books and then read reviews of them from other folks out there.

Here's the thing, I am still all about simplicity. For my own personal use, I think I might still use (besides, I already have all of my books listed there). I would recommend Good Reads for folks like my mom or mother-in-law who are avid readers but not so techy. I would also recommend Good Reads for students interested in something like this as the layout is simple, there are not a lot of extra links and the site is user-friendly. As a matter of fact, I did use it with my after school reading club. We even named our group the GoodReads Club! We kept track of what we had read on there. The girls really enjoyed being able to do this. One of the options on Good Reads that we really enjoyed using was the different book shelves that we created....Books We Are Currently Reading, Books We Have Already Read, and Books We Want to Read. I also created shelves for YA books, BOB books, etc. Similar to tagging.

Library Thing is a great option to use as a link on our library web pages. I am sure that I will add it to mine. One of the things that I will be sure to do is to customize my page to be as simple as possible so that when people link to it for the first time, they won't be overwhelmed and close it right up.

Both sites have recommendations, reviews, talks/forums, friends, etc.