Friday, August 8, 2008

A Fabulous New Way to Waste Time Online

A few weeks ago, a classmate of mine who has my email address from our reunion invited me to join an online community called Goodreads. I am a librarian, so naturally I love to talk to people about books and share my favorite literary experiences with my friends. But I had no idea enough people feel this way to fuel a My Space-like community.

Rather than wasting time reading my blog this weekend, go waste time on this site. You create an account and use their Amazon search tool to create a library of books you have read. From there you can rate and review those books.

Then the fun part. You can enter email addresses of people you want to search for to see if they're already on Goodreads, or you can search for people by name. You can even invite people to join. Then like My Space you can create a Friends list and see each other's profiles and books.

If you play with it, look me up, those of you who know my first and last name. If you are a lurker and don't know me, post your profile name and location in the comments and I will try to find you to add to my Friends list. In fact, if you want to do that anyway, the tens of you who read the blog regularly can network with each other about books and get a more diverse list of good things to read.

The first week I had an account, I spent hours updating my book list. And then more hours looking at some of my high school classmates' lists. It can be addictive.

But I am just a book geek.

Have fun!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's so funny you added this today. I was just wandering around the bookstore tonight, wishing I could find something to read! I'll have to check it out.

Anonymous said...

I have not updated my list in FOREVER and it probably will never be up-to-date. What I really LOVE about this site is the suggested readings from my friends. There are books listed on their pages that I would probably never think about picking up or even know they were there and of course, we do share common interests so the readings have been pretty good!
You are right about being on there for a long time once signed in...maybe I will take time this morning and add a couple books.