Ever felt like reading but couldn’t quite decide on what to read? Or, wished someone else can help you make the decision? When I was a little girl, reading was my obsession. I used to ask people about what they’re reading, what’s the book about? Who wrote it? Did they like it? Do they recommend it? The number of people I knew then limited my sources & our preferences varied most of the time, which doesn’t make their recommendation of a great value to me. Then Web 2.0 came along with its magical powers bringing Goodreads to the virtual world!

“When I want to know what books to read, I’d rather turn to a friend than any random person, bestseller list, or algorithm” -- Otis Chandler, Goodreads founder.

Goodreads, a Web 2.0 social cataloging site that harness collective intelligence of the individual readers. Launched in December 2006 as a free service that allows its users to build a virtual replica of their own libraries and share the contents of its bookshelves with others. Goodreads users who accept the default mode of public profiles don’t have to do anything more to share their books. They can add books to their shelves then rate, review, tag and discuss it & other people can see them immediately. On the other hand, users can implicitly add value as a side effect of using the application; as an outcome, better search results will retrieved & lists like: (people who viewed this book viewed, other books by, groups with this book, shelves with this book) will be generated.

The positive network effect helped increase the value of the Goodreads services; as more users joined, consequently more books & meta-data about it were added. “As of December 2007 the site has over 650,000 members and over 10,000,000 books added. By January 2010 that had reached 2,900,000 members and 78,000,000 books added” according to Wikipedia (2010). Based on the user base growth Goodreads been through, services’ improvements were on order. Users are now able to add trivia, quizzes, events, quotes, videos, their own writings & swap book (limited to the US).

Goodreads’ one-step sign up process, simple books’ compatibility quiz & services connectivity friends-search base help quickly set users to join billions of readers sharing bookshelves. The question is why would they? Goodreads made sure users are able to achieve personal goals without more ado! Some of those goals are: communicating & social networking based on reading interests, gaining a better sense of reading patterns, planning future readings, getting books recommendations. Although there are other Web 2.0 applications built around the same idea. Goodreads stayed a head of the competition with its major rivals because it’s simply bug-less compared to shelfari & unlike Librarything it doesn’t limit readers who sign up for the its service to stacking 200 books or less on their bookshelves. Despite being strongly US-oriented service, Goodreads is making a huge success building a loyal very active and highly well informed community with promises to extend the US-only services to the other countries.

Are you a member of Goodreads? Share you experience & tell us why are you using it? What do you like, hate about it? Suggestions you have?

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The Goodreads: Reading, anyone? by Najla AlNomair, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.