Thing 19: Social Reading & Book Stuff

Here's another topic I've been wanting to explore.  A parent just told me today how much she loves her Goodreads scanner for when she's in a book store, and the librarians in my district have been debating if Goodreads, Shelfari, or something else is best for sharing what we're reading with each other and with our students.  (After working on Thing 14, I'm also excited to add a lot of the book/literacy apps (such as Overdrive, http://daybydayny.org, etc.) to my "Library in Your Pocket.") In Thing 19 I browsed through most of the topics, then focused on the book sharing since that's  been on my agenda.  I've heard of Library Thing, but haven't explored it before. Right from the registration process on good reads I liked it better than Shelfari.  In Shelfari I found rating books cumbersome and boring.  In Goodreads I quickly found myself excited to see so many of my favorite children's picture books, including classics like Winnie the Pooh and Peter Rabbit, and very recently published favorites like Echo.  I was also immediately noticing titles that are new to me, and wanting to get distracted and follow their links to find out more about them. I spent some time updating my shelf and selecting books I want to read, then got the widget and pasted the html into my webpage to share what I've recently read with my students.  I hated the look of the shelf!  :( So, I took it down.  Maybe I'll use Goodreads for my own book selection tool and Shelfari for sharing?  The problem is, life is too busy to maintain two shelves!  I guess I'll keep playing around with the Goodreads shelf.  I spent some more time on the Goodreads widget customizer, but still couldn't get it right.  For now, I swapped out my Shelfari for my new Goodreads on this blog.  I'll keep trying to get it to work how I want it, and to create book groups on Shelfari with my students.  Maybe a summer reading book group?