Looking for a good way to share your thoughts on your favorite (or not-so-favorite) books with friends and colleagues? Check out Goodreads, a social network for bookworms. With Goodreads, you can track your reading habits, post comments and reviews of books you’ve read, and engage in virtual book groups (or even create your own!). Best of all Goodreads is totally free! You just need an Internet connection to join.
In this lesson, we’ll create a Goodreads account and add a book to our reading list. This will take about 10-15 minutes.
First, open the Goodreads website in your browser.
Fire up your favorite web browser and go to http://www.goodreads.com/ . Click the Sign Up button to continue.
Sign up for a Goodreads account.
Enter your name, e-mail address, and a password. If you’re concerned about privacy, you don’t have to enter your full name. Your e-mail address won’t be visible to other Goodreads users. If you check the "send me new book reviews from my friends" box, you’ll receive periodic e-mail messages to let you know when your Goodreads friends have updated their reading lists. You can also get this information via RSS, if you’d prefer.
Click Next to continue.
Find friends who are already on Goodreads (optional).
If you use Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, or AOL for your e-mail, you can log in here to find friends and colleagues who have already joined Goodreads. This is totally optional. Since I don’t use any of these services, it doesn’t apply to me, so I’m going to click Skip This Step.
Start adding your books!
Your account is ready to go! Let’s get some books in there. Click Add books by title or author.
Search for your book.
It’s easy to add your library to Goodreads. I’ll show you how to add a single book, but there are ways to upload batches of information from other services, such as your Amazon.com wishlist.
Begin by typing in the name or author of your book. In this example I want to add A Whole New Mind, by Dan Pink, so I’ve entered the search string whole new mind. Click Search to continue.
Find your book in the search results.
My search has yielded two possible books. The first one is the one I’m after. Hover your mouse over the Add to My Books button for your book, but don’t click just yet!
Add your book to one of your bookshelves.
Goodreads uses a bookshelves metaphor for sorting your books. When you hover your mouse over the Add to My Books button, Goodreads gives you the option to add this book to one of your shelves. By default, you get three shelves: read, currently-reading, and to-read. You can add your own as well–we’ll cover that another time.
For now, I’m just going to add this book to my read bookshelf by clicking the button next to read.
Review your book.
I’m now given a short form in which to post my thoughts about A Whole New Mind and give it a rating. I can also move it to a different shelf–for example, from to-read to currently-reading. Click Save to add your review, then click Close This Box to return to your book search results.
Repeat this process to add additional books to your bookshelves. They can be books you’re reading now, books you’ve already read, or books in your queue.
That’s it for now!
We’ve covered how to create your Goodreads account and how to begin adding books. Next time we’ll shuffle books from shelf to shelf and begin adding friends, family and colleagues to our Goodreads friends list.
[...] a social network for book readers. If you haven’t done so yet, take a few minutes to read over the article, and maybe even create a Goodreads account for yourself. In the next couple of days, we’ll move on to organizing our virtual bookshelves and growing [...]
[...] we get started, if you haven’t already, go ahead and at least create a Goodreads account (you don’t have to add books to it yet)–that will make it easier to follow along. You [...]