A year or two ago, I signed up for an application called Visual Bookshelf on Facebook. I rarely use third-party applications on Facebook, since it's become clear that these applications collect personal data from user profiles. However, as someone with a reading list that spans as many pages as a Masters' thesis summary, and who treated her undergraduate degree in English literature as a four-year series of book club meetings, I was enthusiastic about an app that would let me brag to my friends about the many extremely tasteful books I was reading at any given time. After all, if there is any public space that embraces narcissism, it is Facebook.
The beauty of the Visual Bookshelf application was that it published a note in your friends' news feeds whenever you made a change in your "shelf": Meghan is now reading War and Peace. Meghan has just finished reading Great Expectations. Meghan would like to read a Faulkner trilogy, but doesn't want to end up suicidally depressed. (Okay, I made that last one up -- the status notices did not allow for ironic editorializing.) News feeds would also display reviews that any of your friends made after reading books, recommendations, and encouraged sharing -- ie, Rachel owns a book that you just indicated you'd like to read.
Then everything changed: Facebook went through one of its maligned format changes, and suddenly the Visual Bookshelf application no longer functioned in the same way. Maybe it had been designed to work best with the older version of Facebook, and no longer shows up properly. I'm not sure. But either way, something got messed up: now, when I click on my Visual Bookshelf tab, it brings me to a page called LivingSocial. What is LivingSocial? Some other kind of book-related community, sure, but how did I end up with a profile here? The publishing features have changed, too: instead of publishing an item in my friends' news feeds about what I'm reading, people would have to actually click on the "Books" tab in my Facebook profile to see my latest "activities". Nobody cares that much about what I'm reading, not even my fellow book nerds. It's simply too much effort -- too hidden.
More recently, I discovered Chapters-Indigo's online Community. From what I could tell, it was essentially Facebook for booklovers: you can add books to various "shelves", like "plan to read", "already read", etc, but you could also add people as friends, join discussion groups, participate in chats. In principle, it was a great idea; in practice, not so much. I don't know of anyone else among my friends who have Community accounts with Indigo, and I wasn't interested enough in the discussion groups to seek out strangers as "friends". I did continue to use my account, mainly for the shelf application. Whenever I get personalized emails from Chapters-Indigo suggesting books I might like (to purchase), there's an option right in the email to add books to my shelf. I use it as a way to track books I come across that I want to check out at some point.
But to complicate matters, Indigo also has Wishlists and Shopping Cart lists inside user accounts on its website. Wishlists are clearly geared toward gift-giving, so that friends and family can find out what books you'd actually like to receive ("Oh, thanks Uncle Marvin, this biography of Winston Churchill looks just fascinating..."). Shopping Cart lists are books you've decided you actually want to purchase online. At some point during the Indigo online experience, I completely forget where I've listed what, and end up feeling like I have no overall list that is reflective of what I hope to read anytime soon.
Recently I've begun following several book bloggers on Twitter and Google Reader to get a better sense of what other people are reading. Not everyone's taste is the same as my own, but I'm convinced that I will stumble upon far more great books this way than if I were left to my own devices. And a few of these bloggers are members of Amazon book clubs, or a community called Goodreads. Goodreads seems to combine all of the aspects that I'd like to see in a book-related community, but frankly I'm a bit tired of going to the trouble of creating new profiles, loading up my latest lists, and then letting it fall to the wayside. I've got Social Book Networking Fatigue. By the time I discovered BookLounge.ca, a site dedicated to promoting books from Canadian publishers McClelland & Stewart, Random House, Doubleday and others, I was totally confused about which sites to participate in.
To me, it seems pointless to maintain a Facebook account, a Myspace page, a Twitter page, a personal blog, a Tumblr account, Google Reader feeds including the sharing-with-friends feature, and so on through the less mainstream sites like Digg and Delicious. I stick to the basics: Facebook for people I actually know in real life, Google Reader for real-world news and for following traditional blogs, and Twitter for witticisms and general lurking purposes to keep up with trends.
The same holds true for bookish sites: I can't possibly keep up with three or four different communities and accounts. I might get a better representation of all the great new books that are out there, but I'd never get any work done if I had to devote that much time to even reading the updates, let alone participating. So which one to pick?
Anything's better than an Excel spreadsheet list.
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