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kraitSo far I am finding Goodreads.com frustrating. It's not what I was really hoping for -- far too simple, but the layout is as difficult as the site is simplistic: still no way to place all my reviews on one page, still no way to, I dunno, be notified when a book by Author X is released? Definitely no way to move things from "read" to "reading" to "read" in a way that would keep a tally -- it would be really fascinating to see how many times I reread books, and which ones get the most rereads. (Obviously, a way to enter a ballpark figure for any book added would also be helpful, since I have reread most of my books in the years I have owned them. But even starting everything from "once" would be okay.)
Still no way to reorder the books on the list; they're all jumbled together in a pile based solely on when I added them, and I haven't found any way to sort them by series or whatever. (Perhaps I could assign imaginary "Finished Reading This" dates to them, and sort them that way? Can I set it to always show that way, or would I have to reorder it every time I logged in? Must experiment...)
Some sort of "make notes about this" option would be nice, too -- because a lot of what I want to remember about the books I read isn't the sort of thing one puts in a review, which will be read by others and has to concern itself with spoilers, basic mechanical/plot issues, and other very basic details. What I want is a way to remind myself that X and Y in this book reminded me of the relationship between D and E in another book; that it has hints of Kink A; that the [SPOILER] really fell flat and I am not to buy the sequel. These are things that other readers don't want to know (personal kinks or purchasing notes) or don't need to know (spoilers, my specific emotional reactions to random stuff), but I'd like to keep track of.
People of my flist who track their reading online, what do you use? What sorts of info do you really want recorded? (Maybe I'm just insanely organised in ways no other person wants?)
Conclusion: too much social networking, not enough recordkeeping. Overall disappointing. (Oh, and it's not even easy to use social networking -- the hoops I had to jump through, just to add a few authors to my "favourite author" list! Egad.)
Still no way to reorder the books on the list; they're all jumbled together in a pile based solely on when I added them, and I haven't found any way to sort them by series or whatever. (Perhaps I could assign imaginary "Finished Reading This" dates to them, and sort them that way? Can I set it to always show that way, or would I have to reorder it every time I logged in? Must experiment...)
Some sort of "make notes about this" option would be nice, too -- because a lot of what I want to remember about the books I read isn't the sort of thing one puts in a review, which will be read by others and has to concern itself with spoilers, basic mechanical/plot issues, and other very basic details. What I want is a way to remind myself that X and Y in this book reminded me of the relationship between D and E in another book; that it has hints of Kink A; that the [SPOILER] really fell flat and I am not to buy the sequel. These are things that other readers don't want to know (personal kinks or purchasing notes) or don't need to know (spoilers, my specific emotional reactions to random stuff), but I'd like to keep track of.
People of my flist who track their reading online, what do you use? What sorts of info do you really want recorded? (Maybe I'm just insanely organised in ways no other person wants?)
Conclusion: too much social networking, not enough recordkeeping. Overall disappointing. (Oh, and it's not even easy to use social networking -- the hoops I had to jump through, just to add a few authors to my "favourite author" list! Egad.)
no subject
Date: 2011-07-15 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-19 07:36 am (UTC)Maybe people on my flist could be encouraged to post about it and its awesomenesses? :D
no subject
Date: 2011-07-19 04:03 pm (UTC)I ended up finding LibraryThing much easier to use. Actually, *super* easy to use. While I've had mine for a while (I actually signed up almost two years ago, got excited and got a paid account - which is interesting because they give you a whole range of 'price you want to pay' for a paid account/permanent account - forget I had it, and rediscovered it a few months ago.) I've very slowly as work permits been adding a few books at a time, so I haven't actually used all the features, but they have a lot of nice features.
For one thing, you can sort the books in your library by just about anything - author, title, publishing date, date added, genre, rating, and the tags you've assigned it. You can even sort them by series and decimal system, and others I haven't played with yet. Plus, they have collections - like 'your books', 'wishlist', 'to read', 'read but unowned', etc. - and you can add your own collections.
In the individual book section, you can use tags (I actually have tags saying how I acquired the book), and they allow you to make both public notes and private notes as well as reviews. You can enter the date you got the book, and reading dates, as many as you want (now that's cooooool).
One thing I love is that you can edit almost all of the information about the book so that it's actually the book you have. I really hate having a book picked that has the wrong cover from my copy, or it's a different edition, or the size is different - all those things. Thus, I can go in and make sure every detail matches my copy.
Overall, LibraryThing seems to really really love stats and data. They've got a whole page just for that, plus numbers scattered all over every single page, which I enjoy.
Oh, and there's a large networking section too, which I haven't even looked at since I'm not interested in it at all, so the good news is that if you couldn't care less about that part, it still functions perfectly well for just record keeping.
I'd recommend giving it a try, just signing up and poking around it for a while. At the most, you'll have wasted an afternoon if it's not right for you, but then again, it might be just what you're looking for. And if you have questions about it, I might be able to answer some of them. (Though I'm hardly an expert!)
no subject
Date: 2011-07-22 01:21 am (UTC)Do you know offhand if there's any way to import a booklist from Goodreads to LibraryThing, so I don't have to add those 450+ books by hand? :D
no subject
Date: 2011-07-22 04:58 am (UTC)It looks like you can - under the add books page, there's an import option, and it seems to let you import from a file or a website - that option might be great. Bah, see, that's the problem - the people who find these sites really useful also have a gazillion books ... which is why I'm *still* adding mine. :s