A few months ago, I stumbled upon a post where people were complaining about Goodreads. I have to admit, I was rather surprised since so many fellow reader and author use it, and for me it appeared to be perfect. It really has everything I need, rating, reviews, shelves, groups, lists and so on. I did try both Shelfari and Booklikes, but I always returned to Goodreads. Later on I read about an occasion when reviews got removed, but it didn't affect me and to be honest, I didn't care about it much.
Then I few weeks ago, I received an email from Amazon which I was invited to join Shelfari in and being keen on trying out different programs, I re-considered my choice of bookish social site along with a not so short research.
Shelfari is a book review site launched on October 11, 2006 by
Amazon. It has many features (that Goodreads has ((groups, how many books you're planning to read in 2014, shelves, even lists, etc.))), however, its book & author pages are more elaborated, though mostly edited by members. Settings and your profile also offers a few more extra options, some of which really fun (you can change what type of wood you's like your shelf to be made of). What's more, it's colorful and friendly with just as many books. The only drawback is that being a less well-known site, less people use it which means fewer reviews, ratings, and information on books. Another one is that there's no app for either Android or IOS.
BookLikes is the youngest of the three, it was launched in June, 2011 by Dawid Piaskowski, yet it's a much stronger competitor of Goodreads than Shelfari; it's been claimed to replace it even. Though I have doubts about that, it's true that BookLikes has gained a lot of user during its few years.
For the first sight, it seems way simpler than the other two, and you might not tell it has to do anything with the Goodreads type of sites as it's more blog-like. Very blog-like indeed. It's dashboard is almost completely alike with Tumblr, you even acquire the link to your blogish BookLike url. The shelves aren't left out here, either, but in my view it loses of it's original purpose, especially saying it after searching on some books and not finding them. (I searched on books that are not so hyped and/or haven't been published yet on all three sites to test them.) The site is also for purchasing, you can find giveaways and daily deals, however, here the groups didn't get place along with lists, but not the never-to-be-missed yearly reading challenge.
And last, but not the least, good old Goodreads. It'snot much older than Shelfari, yet it is the biggest, the most famous and the one bearing the utmost books and utmost members. It's probably got the utmost features, too, shelves, bazillions of groups, lists, challenge, author program, recommendation, giveaways (lot of International), trivia, quizzes and so on, even creative writing!
However, to have so much has it's downsides as well. So many books yield so many reasons to so many different people with different personalities for hating. Frankly, I've never as much constant fighting than here and it can be pretty disheartening. Sometimes even books that not out yet get one star ratings, because certain fellas aren't interested in it or so. Furthermore, many book receive unfittingly low ratings thus if you see a book with 3,5 starts, but you like the synopsis, think no more just read it. For the most part, it will be fairly great.
Although I would have been curious about what happened, I couldn't find out much about the reviews-deleted scandal. The only thing I learned was that they deleted referring to ToS changes and then pledged to send them to their writers, but it never got fulfilled. (Do you know something about it?)
My choice...
BookLikes didn't impress me much to be honest, and although Shelfari is good it's a too small community for me. However, maybe I would move if it wasn't for the over 400 books I have and ratings and reviews, groups and lists on Goodreads. Until something very gruesome error occurs you will find me there happy with all those information I preserve on the site (and app).
Let's discuss!
Which one do you use?
Which one do you like/dislike and why?
Were you affected by the Goodreads's review-delete spree?
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