I love Last.fm. I love being able to track exactly what I’ve been listening to, when, over the last two years. I love finding other artists and albums that I should enjoy. And I love finding other people who like the same music as me.
I love reading. I read, easily, a book a week. Often more. I tend to have more than one book on the go at once. I wish there was an easy way for me to keep track of what I read, when. I wish there was a way for me to find other people who read what I do. And I wish there was a way to find other authors and titles to enjoy.
But there isn’t. There is – as far as I can tell – no “social reading” site out there. In this whole Web 2.0 thingy, books seem to have got left behind.
Sure, there are sites (and software, for Macs, at least) that let you put your library online. That let you swap books with other users. That let you “release books into the wild“. That recommend new books to you.
But nothing that truly acts as a Last.fm for books. LibraryThing is the closest, but it’s nothing like as easy to use as it should be. I have to dig around before I can enter when I start and finish reading, enter a review or tags, rate the book… Shelfari is also promising (and has lots of money from Amazon, so could get better), but still not what I want.
Has anyone else come across a better “social reading” service? Or am I going to have to get my hands dirty and code something for myself?
I’m going to keep a track of what I’m reading on LibraryThing for the time being, but from the playing about with it I’ve done so far, I can tell I’m going to get fed up with it quite quickly…
Photo by me, at Flickr