I’ve Joined BookLikes – Announcement & a Short Review

Actually I did that already in August, but I needed some time to make it look presentable.

I imported my books from Goodreads, but it made a bit of a mess, so I had to edit the shelves and then edit all the reviews manually. And since I’m an idiot, I synchronised it with Goodreads before making the changes, so it messed my Goodreads in turn, but now I have finally tamed everything into some semblance of order.

I am not planning to leave Goodreads (for now), but BookLikes caught my eye with its tumblr-like platform, so I guess it will serve as an alternative/back up.

Just what I needed, you’ll say, another thing to distract me from blogging, but at least it is a book-ish thing and maybe its less formal feel will help me get my blogging & reading mojo back.

Things I like about BookLikes:

• A tumblr-like platform with an integrated blog and various kinds of posts you can make.
• There is a public view – what other people see and a ‘dashboard’ view' – which enables you all the editing etc, and brings the feed from people you follow. And I like that you can customise what is displayed in the public view.
• A lot of options how to shelve your books.
• A great review-writing interface, you can easily add tags, decide if a post is a review or not, hide spoilers, oh and you can connect each post with up to 10 books, which is perfect for all sorts of Top Ten lists.
• Fast implementing of new useful features.

Things I miss in BookLikes:

• The ability to edit a post from the public view.
• The option to switch between book editions like on Goodreads: You can do that when importing, from the imports page, but not from later on from your shelves, so if you want to change edition you have to delete the existing one or else you have duplicates. .
• Duplicates finding tool would have been great as well.
• On the whole, the book base is not as good as on Goodreads, but they are working on it, so it’s getting better, I think.
• Oh, and I’d love if they enabled removing multiple books from the so-called thematic shelves, but not from your library altogether. (For example, I decided to split my borrowed shelf into books borrowed from friends and those I borrowed from the library. It’s easy to select multiple books and add them to a new shelf, but you can’t bulk-remove them from the ‘old’ shelf because that removes them from your library completely, so I had to manually un-tick the borrowed-from-the-library shelf for each of the books I moved to borrowed-from-friends shelf.)
• Maybe more easy-to customise theme options. For now there are only thee themes which you can customise, and I did try something, but I don’t have enough coding etc. knowledge for anything fancy.

I have probably forgotten other things, both those I like and those I miss, but BookLikes is still growing and developing, so I’m sure it can only get better. I guess I’ll see. Also, I’m still getting the hang of it, which is why it may still look a bit dishevelled. Plus I need to really start and explore it and follow people, etc.

Anyway, if you are on BookLikes, give me a shout, so I can follow you and make my experience better.

Feel free to follow my BookLikes profile, if you’d like.
(I also made a nice new social button for it to fit with all the others in the sidebar.)

And if you are on BookLikes, what do you think about it? Do you have any tips for me?