Librarything.com: TheDeterminants

 

If you are a proud bookworm who wants to brag about all the books you read, then librarything.com is a website for you. Librarything.com, in a few words, is a social networking site with a twist – it relates its users with the books they read. That is, like your typical Facebook account where you collect and add friends, here the only difference is that you collect both friends and books.

 

A snapshot shown below shows the user interface of the website, specifically the library section where users stack their books.

Founded by Tim Spalding in 2005, librarything.com introduced a new genre of social networking and indirectly created the “largest book club online”. Equipped with its excellent book searching capabilities, users can find all the books relevant to them and post it to their online personal libraries which others can freely view. Once they have added their books, users can also add tags to it for easier searching as their library gets bigger over time. Of course, users cannot access the content of the books they are adding. Although the process of adding books to your personal library is merely adding their cover pages, this is perfectly fine since the site is not about reading books online anyway, but collecting, documenting, tagging, and of course, bragging it.

 

Adding books into your virtual library is quite easy. Just search for the book you're looking for and the website gets information from Amazon.com, Library of Congress and other libraries around the world.

Librarything.com also analyzes the books its users have in their libraries and recommends books that they might like. It does this by finding other people’s libraries which best resembles yours and then reporting you what they have read that you have not yet. This makes book hunting more personalized and has a better probability of giving its users a better recommendation.

This website, which has a catalogue of nearly all of the books in this planet, is establishing dominance among its kind and boasts 600,000 unique registered users while enjoying a margin of about 0.1% from its biggest rival shelfari.com. Data from alexa.com reveals that most of its users come from the US with 43.9% share of its total visitors, and only 0.8% of its users come from the Philippines..

The site targets avid readers as well as book authors to provide them a venue to exchange ideas. Also a social networking site, it also allows its users to create profiles, comment on other people’s libraries, recommend books, or even warn others from reading a ridiculously boring book. Another cool but quite eerie feature of this website is that one can search for other users with the same library and books as you have. Here, you can find other people with the same taste as yours and add them as your friends.

As a profitable e-business venture, it generates its revenues mainly from three sources: advertising, book store referral fees and user subscription charges (users can register only 200 books for free. Beyond that limit they collect a fee). This site is also a good marketing strategy for online book sellers like amazon.com as it provides a portal where book buyers and sellers can transact online.

 

The site is easy to manipulate and has many excellent tools, but it lacks aesthetics. Though functionality is more important than aesthetics, the online world however, seems to value them equally. Its lack of aesthetics makes first time users clueless about what the site offers, and in a sense does not give them the incentive to make the first move and click the sign-up button. Based from our personal experiences, though we liked the functionality of the site, we found it difficult to comprehend what the site is for until we read its article in Wikipedia.

 

Also, compared to its rival shelfari.com as shown below (which is by the way gaining more users), shelfari’s graphics is by far better which makes its functionality better to understand before even the visitors hit the sign-up button.

However, though these problems exist, librarything.com still overtakes shelfari.com in terms of its number of users – providing a better community of book lovers.