Book Cataloguing Website Review 1: aNobii

Social cataloguing is supposed to be the next step after social networking, and from January, I’ve been joining and checking up some book cataloguing websites. The basic modus operandi is: sign in, search for a book, add it to your shelf, rate, review and recommend. These sites are obviously of advantage to me. Once I upload every book I own, have read or want, there is lesser chance that I end up buying duplicate copies. I still end up doing that, and pass on the duplicates to cousins who then gift them to their friends for birthdays and the like. The other thing is, I need not carry a huge sheaf of papers containing the name of every book I want. All I have to do is open my mobile, surf my bookshelf, and voila.

Five well-known websites for book cataloguing are:
aNobii
Books iRead (or WeRead)
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Shelfari
There are a couple more that provide similar services. More on those in a later post.

Anyway, after joining up and spending weeks and weeks checking them out until my eyes threatened to give out, I’ve got some idea of how they work and which one would be better for what. So over the next few updates, I’m going to review each of these websites, starting with aNobii in today’s post. Reviews will carry features of each site, advantages or pros, disadvantages, and the best thing about the site.

aNobii

This website is over three years old (one of the earliest book-cataloguers), and is based in Hong Kong. The weird name? Here’s the answer, directly copied and pasted from their website:
“The short answer is that it comes from the first few syllables of Anobium Punctatum, which is the proper name for bookworms.”
For more on that: http://www.anobii.com/blog-wp/?p=6.

Features and Pros (Features and pros are clubbed together):
1. If you want to buy, there are links with sale price in the currency of your choice to all Amazon sites for most books.
2. Allows basic ratings.
3. Not riddled with heavy graphics and very quick to load.
4. Search boxes on each page – use ISBN or title.
5. Import book list from Excel, Amazon, personal website, blog or LibraryThing.
6. Describe where you bought/found each book
7. There’s a Taste Compatibility metre, so you can see how many books you have in common with some random bloke, and hook up with him if necessary. Also, you get to see how many people have similar shelves.
8. Sell, swap or lend books.
9. If you’ve borrowed books, enter the due date, and the site will remind you to return them.
10. Make notes (apart from comments).
11. See who else viewed your book list.
12. Vote for your favourite comments about each book (not sure how this works).
13. Allows the following options for each book you enter:
- Finished
- Not Started
- Reading
- Unfinished

Now my opinion is of no consequence whatsoever to aNobii or whoever reads this, but hey, it’s my blog! I think that “Finished” looks a bit awkward with “Reading” – it would have been better to have Read, Unread and Reading as the options. By Unfinished, I suppose they mean the books we began but discarded, since Reading is already an option? So shouldn’t that be Unread?

The cons:
1. Few users, fewer editions. ONE person’s shelf has the Robin Cook I searched for, and the website didn’t have the edition I wanted. And mind you, I searched on the global site*.
2. The basic white page might be boring to a lot of people.
3. I find staring too long at pages with white backgrounds is harsh on the eyes (my eyes, at least).
4. The website guesses your region and takes you to the custom pages for your region. Eeek! I don’t want them knowing my IP number!

5. You have to click on the link to Global Site* at the bottom of the page to quit the region-specific option. That way you get more books in your search results, and even then it’s a dismal figure.
6. The book list/shelf occupies just a part of the page, so it’s distracting with so many other things showing up.
7. The use of the term “shelf” is an out and out misnomer for this website. It’s more like a list, a very basic one which just tells you the name of the book and the author, the rating you gave it and if you’ve finished it or not.

8. The most basic of all the websites. Once you been to any of the other sites, you're not going to come back to this one.

Didn’t see if there was a blog widget. I didn’t like the look of the “shelf” anyway, and wouldn’t have put it on my blog.

What I Liked Best: I’m thinking, I’m thinking, gimme time.

Disclaimer: I am not trying to promote any of these websites, nor am I associated with them/their creators and employees. I’m just a user who signed up for a free account on all these websites, used each one for at least a week before I decided to write this review. All views and opinions are mine alone. Now, these reviews are not comprehensive and there may be things I’ve left out. Feel free to correct or comment.