BookArmy.com

Recently BoingBoing wrote about BookArmy. They called it a last.fm for books. The site is in public beta, so it’s a little buggy, but so far it looks promising. Like Shelfari, the site allows users to have a bookshelf online. However, unlike social book sites, BookArmy recommends books for you based on member recommendations. It refines recommendations for you based on the favorite books in a users bookshelf.

HarperCollins has a big stake in this company and it looks poised to become very popular, perhaps the Myspace of social book-sharing websites. In fact, in the forums is very lengthy discussion about Twilight author Stephenie Meyer and whether the series is a crazy fad that should go away or the author should be praised for getting the young folks reading (a la Harry Potter).

I signed up today. This is my profile. I haven’t filled out much of the info. yet, but BookArmy is definitely a site I’ll be hanging around frequently for a while. And of course, BookArmy is on Twitter @Bookarmy.

Shelfari vs. Google Library

I’m a Shelfari user. I don’t know if I’d say I’m crazy about the site because I really only use it to catalog my books. I visit the site about once a month. It is technically a social networking site, though (self-proclaimed, “premier social networking site for people who love books”). I do use my account to feature My Shelf on Myspace and Facebook profiles. Anyone interested in connecting can find me here on Shelfari. Aside from a few recent book purchases, you can also see every book I own. I took the time to put in every single ISBN and in a few cases had to dig around (old books that didn’t have ISBNs). I like it. I like the hominess of the site, the community. That said, I like the clean look of Google Library and I already use so freaking many Google products, that it would be nice to have them all interconnected. I haven’t yet added anything to my Google Library, but like all things Goog, I automatically have a library. I could go on a tangent here about Google-addiction, but I won’t. I’m sure that by this point in time, everyone out there can feel my pain love for Google. Here’s my very empty library. You can use Google Book Search to find a library in use. One major plus I noticed with Google Library is that you can type or import a list of ISBNs instead of adding each book to library one at a time. I can tell you, that is incredibly time consuming. I couldn’t find that feature in Shelfari, but with Shelfari you can actually import your Amazon Wishlist or other book lists from a URL. You can also import txt files with your list of books. For now, I plan on sticking with Shelfari, but I may just fill up the Google Library and really give it a chance to defend itself.

Which do you use? If you don’t use anything, tell me why not.

Amazon+Shelfari

It’s official. Shelfari has been acquired by Amazon. So far, there seems to be no big changes that will be hurdled at Shelfari users immediately. It’s likely that this acquisition will make for some big usability changes within Shelfari. I’m also going to predict that eventually all of us with both Amazon.com and Shelfari accounts will be able to add books to our Shelfari shelf from Amazon and probably display our shelf right in our Amazon profile page. I’m interested to see how this plays out.

With Google Booksearch being in Beta and Google gearing up to push it’s own (currently functional) library, this Amazon acquisition will at least help Shelfari hold its own against the giant GoogleMonster.