Find New Books with Shelfari

If you love books, there is a fantastic new site called Shelfari. It is still in beta, but seems to be working well.

To start, you sign up for a free account at Shelfari. You then add your favorite books to your bookshelf. You can either search by title, author, isbn, or, if you are seriously into books, you can upload a text file of ISBN's. I suggest putting 10 or more favorite books on your bookshelf.

That is when the power of Shelfari starts to take over. There is a link on your bookshelf to go to your Shelfari Home page. On that page, Shelfari will list other members who have the same titles on their bookshelves. For example, I learned that a member named dahveedgr had 7 books in common with me. I click on that member's name and I can now browse his bookshelf. Shelfari arranges my view of his bookshelf so that our books in common are at the top. When I see which books we share, I can tell that this member likes books about design and it is interesting to browse through his bookshelf to see if there are any new design books that I might want to add to my collection. This is a brilliant way to find new books that might be interesting to you. If you see on that you like, click it and add it to your wishlist.

For the most part, the Shelfari interface is fairly straightforward. When you click on a title on your bookshelf, a web 2.0 control pops up listing a few things you can do with the title. The details page for the title is buried under the More menu item, which is my only frustration point with the service. If you are concerned about privacy, sign up with a screen name instead of your real name.

If you are going to dive in and list many books, you can tag each book with keywords. The keywords appear at the bottom of your bookshelf so that you can filter to just the books on Excel or just the books on typography.

I set up a reading group for people interested in Charting, although I am not quite sure how I am supposed to get other people to join. There is also a "friends" page, where you can add others will similar books to your friends list. Give Shelfari a try. If you add your favorite Excel & computer books to your bookshelf, invite me as a friend - my userid is bjele - and we can get a great picture of which books are popular with the MrExcel readers.