The New Kid in Town
With the recent upheaval at GoodReads (documented here, here and here), the buzz on Twitter is now all about Booklikes. While I personally was not impacted by the recent changes made by GoodReads to some accounts, I felt maybe it was time to spread my wings and check out some of the other book review social media sites.
When I first started reading and reviewing books, I joined Shelfari. I still use the site and enjoy the book shelf features. I like that I can tag books and share my reviews. It still is the primary place I keep track of my TBR list, books read, and books I am currently reading. However, as I opened my blog and started getting serious about my reviews, I realized that Shelfari doesn’t have the traffic that GoodReads has. So, I imported my books and reviews in to GoodReads (after hemming and hawing for far too long). While it wasn’t a perfect fit, I did enjoy the more social sharing aspect of GoodReads. I found several of my Twitter/Blogging friends on GoodReads, and it was a great place to read multiple reviews of a book in one spot. It is my go to place to find out about books and read reviews. Plus: MOBILE APP! Love that – love being able to update progress or tweet a great quote with ease. So for a couple years now, I’ve continued with both sites and update both with my book reviews. Sometimes it is a pain in the butt to duplicate efforts.
So back several months ago when I first heard rumors of a new site called Booklikes, I joined, but avoided it. I didn’t want yet another site I had to update. However, with the recent issues at GoodReads, I’ve decided to give Booklikes a try. So far I’m giving it a B-/C+.
The pros: Fun to read blogger format, association with multiple bookstores, ability to give 1/2 Star ratings, and FABULOUS customer help. Every time I’ve tweeted a question, I get an answer within 24 hours.
The cons of Booklikes (and why I’m still not sold): everything seems to take an extra step or two to get where I want, no mobile app (however it is in development), difficult to update reading progress and/or status, and the book info (publisher, date, ISBN, etc.) isn’t readily available and you have to go to a third-party site for those details. While I may be able to get over most of this, until the entire site feels more intuitive, I cannot just switch over to Booklikes. In addition, the volume of traffic on Booklikes still isn’t that of GoodReads.
I was disappointed when I learned that the ability to sync my Booklikes updates at GoodReads was removed. So, for now, I will continue to use and update reviews at all three sites. :-/ I’m not sure if it’s helping or hurting me, but I do like to share my thoughts, especially when I love a book.
So what about you? Have you tried Booklikes? Do you use an social media sites to track your book reading? What about when you want to know more about a book or read reviews – where do you look?
Thank you for stopping by to chat! Happy Reading!
I tried BookLikes for a little while. It’s not really for me. I already have a blog and don’t need another one.
Plus when I imported my books from my Goodreads account they all didn’t move over or Booklikes put the wrong cover with the title.
I still use Shelfari and Goodreads. Shelfari was my first too. I use Shelfari for groups. I like their layout for groups better than Goodreads.
But like you said I like Goodreads for seeing multi reviews for one book.
I received an email (below) to let me know that Booklikes would not be syncing for now because the option was deleting books and reviews from Goodreads accounts. So after that I deactivated my Booklikes account since I wasn’t planning on using it.
Hi there,
We have been hearing from several of our members that they noticed some of their books and/or reviews were missing from Goodreads. When we investigated, we found that the deletions had been made by a third party service, BookLikes, through our API and that the Goodreads members concerned were unaware that this was happening.
You are receiving this email because you are a Goodreads member whose books or reviews on Goodreads have been deleted by this third party service through our API. If this happened without your understanding, our team can work to restore any reviews we can. This process could take several days. We will provide you with a list of the books and reviews restored to your account once this is completed. If you DO NOT want your books or reviews restored to your Goodreads account, please respond to this email letting us know by Thursday, October 10th. Otherwise, if we haven’t heard back from you, we will work on restoring your content.
We have contacted BookLikes to let them know about this issue. We have disabled their API access while we look into how they were using it, so the deletions should no longer by happening.
Again, please reply to this email if you do NOT want us to restore your books or reviews to your Goodreads account.
Sincerely,
The Goodreads Team
I was able to bring everything over successfully, and then I added in all of the missing book covers. I agree, I don’t need another blog, but I like the timeline look better than GoodReads. However, like I said, I still have issues with Booklikes, but I’m not ready to completely give up on it yet.
I’ve just recently started using Booklikes mostly bra cause so many others were switching and I wanted to be sure to still get all my friends reviews. I also liked that I could update booklikes and it would sync to goodreads. With that not unread off, I haven’t heard it’s temporary or permanent, makes me thing about this decision. I really don’t want to update multiple sites. I’ll do it for a while and see how it plays out.
That’s where I’m at too.
I only just learned about Booklikes when all the hoopla exploded on Goodreads. I like the layout but agree that it takes too many steps to accomplish something that GR does with one click – hoping this will be improved in the future.
I also started out on Shelfari and joined GR when Shelfari had a mini-melt down and was off-line for 4 days – I thought they weren’t coming back and since Amazon took over, the site has deteriorated :0(
I’m staying on Shelfari and GR for the same reason – I love my groups and reading buddies on those sites and Booklikes is not a viable alternative for this as of yet.
I still really like GoodReads, I hope things calm down over there. It’s too bad that the vocal minority of a few on both ends of the spectrum are making life not friendly for the rest of us users.
I was not personally effected by the recent Goodreads debacle either but they way GR handled the situation was bad. Very bad. I’m going to stick with GR (I basically use the site to track my reading and catalog my books) but I will no longer post my reviews on there. And I will probably remove my reviews that are there.
I created a BookLikes account about 2-3 months ago but never used it until the GR debacle. My experience with BL, from the very beginning, as been anything but smooth. First, I couldn’t create an account. After entering my info, instead of creating an account, the page would only refresh. I had to contact BL’s CS to finally be able to create an account. This whole process took about a week. Then there was the import from Goodreads. That took EIGHT days to complete. After using BL for a while, I don’t like it. It’s too much. I don’t need another blog or another Tumblr page to keep up with. And I don’t like how my reviews turn up on the ‘blog’ section.
I tried Libib, and while the GR import only took 15 minutes, it only imported HALF my books because it doesn’t recognize ebook ASINs. That’s a no go for me. I deleted my account.
I tried out Shelfari when I first started book blogging but for some reason (I can’t exactly recall), I didn’t like it. I don’t know if I left my account inactive or if I deleted it.
I’ve been using LibraryThing (I have a Lifetime membership that I won) for about 3 years now. Before the GR debacle, I was cross posting my reviews on GR and LT. It was 2 sites to keep up with but I did it. Now that I have decided not to post my reviews on GR, I won’t do it on LT either (unless it’s a book I get from their Early Reviewers program).
Wow! Eight days?! Mine transferred over in less than an hour. I have found BL customer service helpful and quick to respond, but after such a rough start, I can see why you aren’t using it. I’ll give it a little longer.
I agree that GR handled things poorly, no matter which side of the fence you may side with (or even if you don’t side with either). But I will continue to post my reviews there, for now. I know a lot of people still use the site for their primary source of reviews.
I only use Goodreads to keep a count of the books I read. I have other shelves, but it they went away, I wouldn’t be heart broken. The drama is overrated so I just stopped posting my reviews and just do a star rating and put it on a shelf with maybe a few sentences.
I opened an account on Booklikes and over half of my books didn’t import because they didn’t have the book in the system. Then I couldn’t find the ARCs I was reading so I gave up and haven’t been back.
I too have a Shelfari account, but I never really used it. Never could find the value of it.
So right now, my blog is the best place to find me, lol.
I probably should make it more simple for myself and back off some of the social sites!
I don’t think I am going to keep my booklikes account. I tried it and it wasn’t for me 🙂 I will probably stick with goodreads as I don’t think I have any shelves or anything that is against their new terms.
Thanks for sharing! No use trying to use something that doesn’t work for you.
I too tried booklikes and libib.
http://booklikes was pretty decent, but I just couldn’t get into it for some reason.
I really think http://libib.com has a lot of potential. Libib’s response time to my emails was amazing, and the few requests I had they got done that week. (Importing reviews was a big one). So for now, I’m holding out hope that libib will be one of the winners in this whole deal.
Thanks for the info. I haven’t tried libib. I’ll have to check it out.
I joined BookLikes over the summer and forgot about it until the Goodreads debacle. Like you, I wasn’t affected by the new GR policy but I do think the way they are handling things stinks.
I like using GR to catalog and track books. BookLikes, like you said, requires an extra step to do anything and it’s off-putting. So I’m going to keep my GR account for now but I will no longer post my reviews there. Before the GR mess, I’d already decided to only provide a brief overview and then a link to the actual review on my blog.
I hope BookLikes work out the kinks soon. I haven’t visited my BL account in over a week because of the issues they’ve been having.
I used to put a short summary of my review and linked back to my blog, but I found it was extra work and people didn’t use the links. I think they read the review if it’s there, but move on to the next review if it’s not. For now, I think I’ll continue to paste my full review in. We’ll see.
The general consensus is that people don’t like (or use) link backs to blogs to read the remainder of the review. I did this too, then stopped.
I wasn’t effected by the GR issues and ONLY have GR. When I looked at Booklikes I noticed it looked like a blog and didn’t want another platform for the same stuff that my blog and GR do. I try to keep my social media to a minimum b/c then I forget to update links, reviews, etc.