Goodreads is a social site for people who love to read, and the designers made it great. First of there are the bookshelves. You can look up books you have read and rate them, this adds them to a shelf labeled "read". You can then go to books and assign them to custom bookshelves that you create and you can write your own review of the book. This makes it super easy to organize what you have read. Then there is the "to-read" shelf, a true wonder. With this shelf you can list and prioritize books that you'd like to read once you finish gobbling up your current book. Have a friend mention a book at a party that sounds intriguing? Use the website, or the handy mobile app, to save it for later.
Then there are the book look-ups. Heard about a book that sounds interesting? Look it up on Goodreads. It shows you the average rating the book gets, a short description of the book and then below that it lists the ratings and reviews of any of your friends that have read that book, followed by the most popular reviews of the book. SO NICE!
Speaking of friends, that is the penultimate point I'd like to make. You can add friends on Goodreads (I use facebook to sign in to Goodreads and used it to see what other friends also use it). You can look at your friends favorite books (which is simply a list of their highest rated ones) and their reviews. Then you can compare books, to see how your tastes mesh with theirs. It is super useful. Have a book club? You can create or join groups on Goodreads and see what others are reading.
The last point I'd like to make in Goodreads' favor is the challange. They have a challange on there to set goals for # of books read in a year. With that you can look at how many total pages you have read in a year that you did this challange and what books you read. It has some other cool plotting tools.
So all in all, I love Goodreads.com. I highly recommend it to the avid and casual reader.
Happy reading,
Cameron
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