Amazon buying Goodreads…

i just found out that Amazon has bought Goodreads and now I’m a little concerned. Don’t get me wrong – I like Amazon. We rent dvd:s from a film rental club they own (Lovefilm) and we buy books and dvd:s from them all the time (sometimes other stuff as well). All the same, I find myself a little doubtful about this acquisition.

So I started looking around for alternatives. I don’t use Librarything much anymore. You can only add 200 books and it seems I’ve hit the limit there. Shelfari already belongs to Amazon and that hasn’t done the site much good. What I dislike the most is that they keep trying to make me log on using my Amazon ID (I don’t have one of my own, my family and I share one).

After a couple of tries, I found several, but a few of them don’t seem to be working properly and I’ll withhold my judgment on them. Another seems really good, a lot like Librarything, only better, but I still don’t fully understand how to use it, so I’ll leave that out as well. That leaves The Reading Room. So far that seems to work great (especially importing my bookshelves from Goodreads). Actually, it seems to be very much like Goodreads, so I feel right at home.

Before I go any further, I have a confession to make – I’m not quite as diligent at posting reviews on Goodreads or Librarything as I used to. I rate the books I’ve finished and I always check online first before I buy a book, but I suppose I like to save my reviews for my own homepage/blog. Which leads me to the second really great alternative to Goodreads: Booklikes.

At first I was a bit surprised and overwhelmed when I realized that not only was it a book review site, you get your own book blog when you sign up. Now, though, I’ve decided to just see how it goes. There were only three blog themes to choose between, but I’m not sure how much I’ll post anyway, so I’m fine just getting to know the site, for now. I think I’ve imported my Goodreads books, but so far nothing shows up, so I don’t know what’s happening. Maybe it just takes time.

Anyway, I think I know enough by now to recommend both sites to book lovers looking for alternatives to Goodreads.

Finally, I’ll just mention the few Swedish book communities I’ve found. They’re not anything like the international ones, just very basic sites. That’s rather disappointing, because I try to balance my book collecting so that I buy/borrow/read almost as many titles in Swedish as in English. When it comes to French, I’m just grateful there are some titles I can get.