Make an online list of books I've read?

April 21, 2010 10:04 AM

Do you know some sort of online database of books where you can make a profile and compile a list of what you've read? (more explanation)

Maybe you know of websites like anime-planet or even last.fm? Both offer means to create some sort of personal listing of anime you've watched/songs you've listened to. (or if you speak French, the website allociné does this for movies and tv series (I'm sure there is an English equivalent, IMDB maybe... anyways))
As a corollary, they also offer different nice perks like suggestions of other anime/musical groups you might like based on your tastes, reviews and the such.

I don't really need the latter features but I'd really love if there was some website I could build a list of the books I've read. I read an awful lot and I can't remember all those books after a while, but I'd really want to. I've tried noting them on papers and the such but it always gets lost and it's not easy to refer to them quickly afterward.
I just recently found one such a list during spring cleaning, a very old list with lots of stuff I had forgotten I had read! I decided I really had to find a proper way to list my readings!

A website like this is awfully convenient as you can share your list easily with friends, and I imagine the website would hold a big database of books so you can browse it and find stuff you had forgotten the title of, maybe even see the covers for those with a visual memory, and so on.

Now, as a final note, in case there is such a website, but it's a "specialized" one (listing only one or a few genres), I'm mainly a reader of Fantasy and Sci-Fi so I'd be looking forward something holding those genres in their list.

Thanks a lot, and I hope I'm making sense!

posted by CelebrenIthil to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

http://www.librarything.com/
posted by Hume at 10:07 AM on April 21, 2010

Best answer: There are a couple of sites that do this:

http://librarything.com
http://goodreads.com
posted by bethist at 10:07 AM on April 21, 2010

Best answer: shelfari.com (exactly like librarything.com as far as I can tell, except allows an unlimited number of books instead of 200)
posted by Jaltcoh at 10:12 AM on April 21, 2010

There are some good answers in this thread from a few weeks ago
posted by chrisamiller at 10:22 AM on April 21, 2010

Best answer: YMMV, but I've tried both LibraryThing and Shelfari and prefer the latter. The UI is cleaner, and I like the (admittedly mainly cosmetic) ability to display a virtual bookshelf with all of the appropriate covers. They also have a pretty decently active community.
posted by Kattiara17 at 10:58 AM on April 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

I love GoodReads.com! It's a great interface and integrates nicely with Facebook.
posted by Raichle at 11:35 AM on April 21, 2010

I've heard good things about librarything, but I love Goodreads myself. It's got nice features to share your reviews with friends on facebook, or friends who are also on goodreads. And it lets you create 'shelves' to organize your books. So I have a shelf for food-history (books like An Edible History of Humanity and Salt) and a shelf for books I listened to as an audiobook. Nice way to keep things organized and see how much you've read.
posted by Caravantea at 12:28 PM on April 21, 2010

There are also a couple of Facebook apps that do this, including Visual Bookshelf and weRead.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:30 PM on April 21, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks a lot all!

I've taken the tour to librarythings, godread and shelfari and I'm gonna go with the latter.
Like Kattiara17, I find this one has the best UI, I also found it somewaht intuitive, with a handy display of the covers and the way it shows you the rest of the books in a serie when you add a volume. (no need to track by hand all the 12-something books of the Wheel of Time! Yay!)
Very good for people that have a very visual memory like me.

Also, I'm not on Facebook (egads! I know! I'm weird like that) so I really can't care less on that feature- but I'm sure it's neat for most people. ;)

And unlimited books? sign me in!

Thanks again everyone, and I wish I found that thread when I searched chrisamiller, but it seems I have been searching for stuff like "books" and "database" when I should have searched for "reading" and "listing" in order to find it...
Silly, tricky keywords! n_n"
posted by CelebrenIthil at 2:05 PM on April 21, 2010

Response by poster: Oh wait, I just told a lie, it's not showing the other books in the series but other editions of the book. Looked too fast. Oh well. Still useful.
Alright then, now on to picking all the WOT volumes one-by-one! ;)
posted by CelebrenIthil at 2:08 PM on April 21, 2010

The community features are pretty weak, but you may want to duplicate your reading list on Google Books. It lets you search the full text of all books in your library, which is great if there's some phrase or name you can't remember the source or page number of. It's better for classic books, which have their entire length available for reading, but it works well enough for contemporary books, which usually have limited previews or "snippet" views. It also supports the "cover view" you were wanting, and lets you do bulk uploading of books via ISBN or ISSN.
posted by Rhaomi at 9:05 AM on April 22, 2010