Online Book Communities

For this exercise I mostly looked at LibraryThing.  This site looks quite useful for people who have extensive personal libraries and have trouble remembering what they have or keeping their books organized.  I was also impressed with the extensive information that users can get for each book.  The book reviews are useful too I'm sure, but reviews are certainly not unique to this site.

Unfortunately, this is another "Web 2.0" site that does not seem very useful for me personally so I did not create an account.  I do not own an extensive collection of books, nor do I ever have numerous books that I am waiting to read.  Also, while having the ISBN, publisher, etc. is useful for libraries, I do not need to know that information for books that I own.

Like the previous exercise, I would also have to question the way that web 2.0 sites supposedly allow you to find people who have the same interests as you.  On LibraryThing I searched for one of my favorite Beatles books and looked through the libraries of some people who also had that book.  I had a very hard time finding anything else in their libraries that I was interested in.  It looks like if you have an account with LibraryThing you can see other people who have the same books as you.  It is difficult to tell from the screenshot exactly how this works.  This would be useful if it only showed people who had many or all of the same books.  Sharing one book in common is not an indicator of many common interests.  For instance, for me to be particularly interested in someone else's library, it would at least need to include books on astronomy, babies, and classic rock.