If you are a book lover, Goodreads is a great social website for you to share what you’ve read and read reviews.
Goodreads.com is a website for book lovers everywhere. If you love to read, and if you love social networking, you should check out Goodreads. The website marries social networking and books in such a way that makes your friends’ reading progress easy to follow and makes it simpler than ever to find your next reading material.
What is Goodreads?
Goodreads is a social network for readers. Like Facebook or Twitter, it allows you to update statuses and share information. Unlike most popular social networks, Goodreads also allows you to show your friends your progress on the book you are reading and to write reviews for everything you’ve ever read. You can see and comment on your friends’ reading progress, as well as create or find a book club group page in your area.
How do you use Goodreads?
Goodreads is simple and intuitive to use. When you sign up for an account, you will be able to find your friends by their email addresses or other social network accounts. Once you have some friends, every time you log in, you will see a timeline of their updates. You can see when they’ve added a book to a list, or when they’ve finished or reviewed a book.
As soon as you have an account, you can also start looking for books you’ve read or that you want to read and add them to your lists. Once you finish reading a book, you can go to the book page and review it by giving it any number out of five stars. If you wish to write a longer review, you can do that, too.
Finding Books
If you have ever finished a book and needed a recommendation for what to read next, Goodreads has the answer. Finding your next book has never been easier. Now, not only can you search for individual books you know you want to read and add them to your “to read” list, but you can also easily see what your friends have recently read.
When you search through friends’ reviews, you can also see who liked what books, making your selection process even easier. Adding books to your “to read” list can help you keep track of what you want to read next, and seeing what books your friends enjoyed – or didn’t enjoy – can help you populate your list of books to read next.
Goodreads on the Go
Like all good social networks, Goodreads has apps for mobile phones and ways to connect to your other social networks. You can get Goodreads for iPhone and Android by downloading them from the App Store or Android Market. You can also connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts so all of your networks know what you’re reading. Furthermore, you can connect your Amazon Kindle to automatically update your progress on your e-books. Last but not least, you can set up Goodreads to auto-publish book reviews to your WordPress or Blogger blog. Sharing your favorite books has never been easier.
Book Clubs
If you are looking for a book club that meets in your area, or one that meets virtually, you can search for that on Goodreads, too. Similarly, if you want to create a web space for your own book club, you can do that easily; just start a new group on Goodreads and update the page to show what books you’re reading. You can also create events to easily share with members where and when book club meetings and author readings are taking place.