Comments on: Shelfari: LibraryThing with a New Coat of Paint?

By: Gary Edmonstone

Gary Edmonstone — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 08:20:35 +0000

Hi Deborah,

I am currently developing a website, http://www.kumbooka.com

I am still in a fairly early stage of developing Kumbooka, however, I would love to work with you on a beta test to see if Kumbooka would work for your students.

On Kumbooka, you can list all the books you own, DVD’s, albums, gadgets and much much more. You can view other users shelves, as long as you have permission from that person, and you can write reviews and rate all items you add. You can also add items as Owned, borrowed, wish list, reading now etc etc.

I do not have any age limit on the site at the moment, and I would be most interested to work with you to see how we can ensure a safe operating environment for younger children.

If you have a few minutes to spare, I would love you to take a look at Kumbooka, and let me know your thoughts.

As I mention, we are a young website, so the time is right to make any changes to ensure a safe environment for your students.

Kumbooka is set up as a limited company in the UK, and we are registered under the Data Protection Act, so you can trust us to work with you, and be sure we will never spam your students, or share their information with other 3rd parties.

Let me know what you think, currently Kumbooka works best on on Safari or Fire Fox, but we are also working to improve the user experience on IE and other Browsers.

I look forward to your thoughts and comments on how we can make Kumbooka the right choice for your students. If you are prepared to work with us on a small beta project, then I would also consider making a small donation to your school in the form of Amazon vouchers.

Kind regards

Gary Edmonstone
Founder of Kumbooka.com

By: Deborah Bobo

Deborah Bobo — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 13:28:31 +0000

I am a school librarian and have been looking for a site for my students to use to review books and look at what their friends have reviewed as well. I also want teachers to be able to look at each of their students ‘shelves’ to see what they are reading. I have personally been using Visual Bookshelf on FB, but you can’t access FB at my school. Librarything is accessible, but states that children under 13 cannot join. I am at an elementary school. An suggestions? Is there software that we could purchase that would work just within our school and function like these social networking sites?

By: Gary Edmonstone

Gary Edmonstone — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:51:05 +0000

For those of you that might be interested, I have been working on developing my own site that allows users to catalog everything from books, through DVD’s, Albums and Gadgets plus much more. I still have a long way to go in making the site a great user experience, but I would love comments from any of your readers on how to improve.

Fell free to take a look at http://www.kumbooka.com and drop me your comments. I also use Shelfari, and like the user experience.

By: Ashish

Ashish — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:48:20 +0000

Shelfari keeps asking me to make a bloody account before I can browse anything beyond their first explore page!

By: David Louis Edelman

David Louis Edelman — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 15:37:16 +0000

Thanks for that, Jason. I may have to check out GoodReads.com — hanging out on book-related social networks certainly should be part of my job too.

By: Jason Pettus

Jason Pettus — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:46:55 +0000

As part of my day job, I am quite active at three different social networks for book lovers — the LibraryThing and Shelfari ones you mention here, plus a third called GoodReads.com. And it’s for sure, what exactly you say here — that in all three cases, there are certain very specific exclusive benefits and drawbacks to them all, making it very difficult to conclusively pick a “best” of them for all situations. GoodReads, for example, contains more user reviews than LibraryThing and Shelfari put together; but the site puts a ridiculously low cap on total review length (about two paragraphs altogether), making the reviews themselves often less helpful than at the other networks. And I definitely and precisely agree with you about the “vibe” you get off LibraryThing versus Shelfari; the former definitely feels like a labor of love, a high-tech anarchist lending library in a basement shop in a big city, while the latter definitely feels like its owners are just waiting at any moment for Amazon to out-and-out purchase them. Again, this doesn’t make either one particularly better or worse than the other; just that there are definitely two very different flavors to them, for those who think that all these social networks are essentially alike.

I will say what is consistently the best about them all, though, and is why I am so active at them as part of my day job — it’s a great place to meet very smart, very passionate lovers of books, not only simple fans but also lots of authors and also executives within the publishing industry (or at least the young, smart ones). It’s a great place to find out about new books you might have never heard of, as well as to argue for great books that others might have never heard of, within generally positive environments full of highly literate (and mostly good-looking) book nerds. Anyway, my two cents. Your fan as always — Jason Pettus, Chicago Center for Literature and Photography

By: tobias buckell

tobias buckell — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:58:38 +0000

I signed up for Shelfari first, but when it came time for adding the ‘currently reading’ widget to my site, LT’s was more minimalist and easy to add to the ‘look’ of my site and was willing to play nice. And I agree with all your thoughts, hence my move to LT when people pointed it out to me…