Online Book Communities

I knew here were websites where we could keep track of books that we've read or want to read, but I had never signed up or played around with one.  After exploring Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari, and Booklikes, I found the advantages of signing up for such websites.  Readers can keep track of the books that they have read, they can read comments on books that they want to read and then shelf them.  What I really liked is that you can create shelves with your own subjects.  This can really help in reminding yourself about what you thought about a certain book. I remember reading lots of book in middle school, but I rarely remember details about those books and adding comments to books that you add on your shelves will definitely help! From the four websites, I liked Shelfari and Booklikes the best!

Goodreads: I use Goodreads a lot when I want to read comments about a certain book or search a similar book to one that I already read and enjoyed reading.   This website was fairly easy to use when searching for books that I wanted to put on my shelf.  But that was about it! I enjoyed reading others' comments about the books that I had chosen.

LibraryThing: This one was the one I liked the least.  I don't know if it was my browser (did not have any problems with the other sites) or the website but searching for books took an eternity!

Shelfari and Booklikes: These two sites are the ones that I would recommend to my students.   They are very similar and fun and easy to work with.  I loved that as you are shelving the books, you can add tags, comments, ratings, etc.  I wish this was available when I was younger so that I would be able to write my comments about the books that I had read.  Most of these ratings and comments can be shared through Facebook or Twitter which is also very nice! I also liked that it is linked to Amazon.  When I clicked on a book that I wanted to read "Love in the Time of Cholera", it was able to take me to Amazon and buy it with one simple click for my Kindle.