Online Book Communities

This blog post focuses on some of the more popular online book communities. There are a lot of different ways your can keep track of what books you have read, want to read, and even what friends are reading. Clicking on any of the website logos below will take you to my profile

The most widely used is Goodreads. As with all of these sites, you can create shelves of books. Normally you have a "read" shelf, "want to read" shelf and "currently reading" shelf. You can rate the books as you read them. As you read and rate more books, the website will give you recommendations of similar books. I like that this website is easy to use compared to some of the others. I liked that you could see what others were currently reading and search by genre.

 LibraryThing was the hardest website to navigate. You are able to create the same shelves as listed above, but adding to these was a challenge. You really needed to know what title you were looking for to find it. I wish the search options were more user friendly. I would like to see what others are reading.

Shelfari is a very user friendly website with wonderful graphics. It was easy to navigate and add books to the shelves. I found it simple to see what others were reading. You can view what is trending by genre, series, author and many more options. Great website!

If you like to blog, then Booklikes is for you. This website is similar to the others, but with the added bonus of being able to blog about what you are reading. The search feature generated blog results more than book results. You can search by book attributes (author, title, etc), but when you explore you just get blogs. I found it hard to just look for books to read. 

Biblionasium is a great website for classroom teachers and librarians. You can customize the classes and books that those classes can see. There are great categories such as favorites, recommended, required and classroom wish list. This is a great way for teachers to communicate with the parents. Teachers of older students can use this to communicate reading lists with the students.

My recommendations:

For Teachers: Biblionasium

For Students: Booklikes (if they love to blog) or Shelfari