Tuesday, March 3, 2009

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.

7 comments:

  1. 99Stars:

    This Librarything.com introduces a somewhat new "genre" of social network. Compared to facebook or multiply which functions only as place for sharing photos, videos, and/or blogs. Even in this time of computers, we can see that many are still interested in reading books.

    The post was informative. It detailed the function, the description, and even the limitations of the site.

    I agree on this statement:
    "Though functionality is more important than aesthetics, the online world however, seems to value them equally."
    I, for one, give importance to the aesthetic value of a site. It's also important for it to be user-friendly: links are easy to access and understand. And it should give fun to its users! :)

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  2. Wow,what an interesting site. I love reading books and sometimes it's hard to decide which book to read.
    Though the site could be really interesting,it looks like it's a bit hard to use based from your review.


    Maybe I'll visit the site one of these days... =)
    Nice review!! =)

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  3. its worth an student's time thats for sure. its market is so wide that not only can it be beneficial to students but as well as any ordinary folk with a heart for learning!

    super cool view!

    it was nice that this was introduced to us in this blog coz i was looking for one myself :)
    thank u!
    (in between names)

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  4. This is a great review of a great website.

    It is practically a step by step tour of the library with snippets of trivia and attitude thrown in…

    I think I want to try out this site. It sounds interesting and innovative; it is just too bad that we can not read the books just like in a real library.

    Good Job!

    Love, Team 1-derful

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  5. Brilliant, this site is simply brilliant. This is perfect for book lovers like me. i have visited the site before, and it is really easy to use. Though i am not really a fan of networking sites, i find this one useful for finding a new book to read.

    The review is also very well done.

    (300/unit)

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  6. What I like about this site is that not only does it organize or catalog the books, but it also gives specific details, insightful reviews and other recommendations. One section called Common Knowledge allows readers to share important details about each book like main characters, important events, important events etc.

    What's also nice is the fact that it's also a social networking site which enables you to connect to other people who have the same taste in books as you.

    - Electronica

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  7. -Jjam Ppong-

    This site is very, very nice. I like it from the moment the page was opened. All the new and renowned authors of famous novels were already displayed in the page. It is very engaging to use because of the artistic web design. It offers a variety of services. You can post your blogs, invite friends and even interact with other users. It is updated every now and then.
    I think I might frequent this site from now on.

    The website review seemed to include a lot of positive things about this website which I absolutely agree. =)

    ReplyDelete