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January 18, 2007

Keep an Eye on Shelfari

Michael Arrington

33 comments »

Seattle-based Shelfari is a book centered social network that launched last fall. There’s lots of competition in this space, including Library Thing, Listal, Delicious Monster and others. The basic idea is to tell Shelfari all of the books you own, and have an online visual representation of your library. Book fanatics and book clubs are the target audience.

Shelfari isn’t as big as Library Thing (key Library Thing stats here), but it is a better designed site and they have a great looking widget to show off the books you own. Shelfari also allows users to insert their Amazon affiliate ID and make money off of any books sold from people clicking on the widget.

Library Thing sold 40% of itself to ABEbooks last year, so they have essentially taken themselves off the market. An acquisition or further financing would have to be approved by them. But the space is interesting enough that venture capitalists and bigger companies are starting to take note, and Shelfari is a good platform.

There are rumors that Shelfari will be acquired or raise a round of financing soon. Perhaps then they’ll be able to hire someone to write those pesky FAQs.

Shelfari was founded by former RealNetworks employees Josh Hug and Kevin Beukelman. John Cook wrote a good launch article about them last year.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. openSermo

    January 18th, 2007 at 11:55 pm

    This could be really useful in addition to the amazon reviews when book shopping. Didn’t know about it before, setting up an account as I write this.

    Thanks!

    Ethan


  2. January 19th, 2007 at 12:31 am

    The writer has made an error in including Delicious Monster in the group named in the article. Delicious Monster is a Seattle-based company that created the Mac OS X application Delicious Library. Delicious Library isn’t just for keeping track of your books, but can also be used to keep track of music, movies and any other item that can be scanned into the application via its bar code. Further, Delicious Library has no social networking components whatsoever in the application. Please ask the writer to update the article with this information.

  3. Anand

    January 19th, 2007 at 12:35 am

    This social networking thing is now going out of control!!

  4. ventureblogalist

    January 19th, 2007 at 12:43 am

    What’s surprising is none of these guys have marketed features towards book clubs. For example, enable building event pages (maybe partner with a renkoo ) and display one book that will be the conversation topic for the next book club meeting. Or, upload audio and text from past meetings.

  5. NatC

    January 19th, 2007 at 1:02 am

    LibraryThing is such a mess to use, it was obvious that something else would come up. A great idea deserved a great service…

  6. AndrewB

    January 19th, 2007 at 1:06 am

    Shelfari is indeed nice but they are limited in terms of sources you can search and add books from. LibraryThing has over 60 sources including Amazon, Library of Congress and tonnes of worldwide Libraries. If you want pretty frills then sure, Listal and Shelfari are your best choice - if you want quality quantities of data with a terriffic recommendations (not to mention their UNrecommendations) system, LibraryThing is there.

  7. Michael Arrington

    January 19th, 2007 at 1:11 am

    #2 - yeah, I know what delicious library is. Listal also allows other types of media to be listed. And all of these companies are after the same customers.

  8. Dan

    January 19th, 2007 at 1:17 am

    I use aNobii (anobii.com), a very similar site, now with nearly 77,000 books indexed (and counting). The site has increased dramatically since I joined in August-time, and they have added so many features it’s hard to keep up. Try it, I’d like to know which one people prefer, Shelfari or aNobii.

  9. SimonW11

    January 19th, 2007 at 1:41 am

    I trialed Anobii at the same time as LibraryThing, I set up it’s improvement suggestions forum and did not like it for numerous reasons. LT remains the big boy on the block and its features and user comunity continue to improve.

  10. sunny

    January 19th, 2007 at 1:54 am

    > Shelfari isn’t as big as Library Thing […], but […] they have a widget to show off the books you own.

    LibraryThing has cover view of any library and blog widgets.

    > LibraryThing is such a mess to use

    Please tell them where you had difficulties - they are eager to make LT as easy to use as possible!
    -> the FAQ thread
    ->     Recommend Site Improvements
    -> Site talk

  11. les

    January 19th, 2007 at 3:35 am

    I’ll agree Librarything may not be aesthectically pleasing as shelfari, but it does have some major downfalls……I reviewed these two recently alongside gurulib…..it’ll show some of the pratfalls of shelfari and tim the owner discusses them in the comments.

    http://librarytwopointzero.blo.....rulib.html

  12. Morgan

    January 19th, 2007 at 6:25 am

    This is a pretty interesting area to me, I’ve got a site much like them that I’m launching sometime in the next months, it’s a crowded area.

    I think I have included a couple of key features that the others miss, while probably coming up short ’socially’. I’ll be sure to beg for a review in the launch forum. Oh god please.

  13. jlp

    January 19th, 2007 at 6:46 am

    Shelfari is downright ugly!! It looks like a billboard, not a catalogue of books.

    Aside from the visual aspect, it’s useless to anyone who has books that the site can’t find. You can add a different edition of a book that they list, but heaven forfend you should have a book they don’t recognize. There appears to be no way to add it. LT, on the other hand, searches dozens of libraries and it’s easy to manually add the rare book not found in a search.

    Furthermore, with LibraryThing, I can actually see the publication and other cataloguing data quickly and easily. Shelfari’s “book details” page isn’t designed for this. (I note that you cannot edit the “general details” on that page, which is a big problem if there’s an error or omission.)

  14. Richard

    January 19th, 2007 at 6:59 am

    Ach…please. What exactly is it that makes Shelfari’s design so much better than LibraryThing’s? The fact that they have half the functionality, hence can afford more whitespace? Or the number of huge, bevelled buttons? Or maybe even the rounded corners?

    I also don’t really get your point about the 40% owned by ABEbooks…does a company cease to be of interest when there’s no immediate chance of raking in funding or of getting acquired?

  15. Jon

    January 19th, 2007 at 7:09 am

    I use aNobii and love it. They are not as big as than LT but much more pleasant to use. Looks like they’ve borrowed some visual techniques from 37signals. There’s been speed problem before but looks like it’s now been solved.

  16. RP

    January 19th, 2007 at 7:53 am

    Chicklit Reviewer is a niche book-loving social network based on the Ning platform.
    Interesting play on a book genre that has taken off in the last few years.
    In addition, women are some of the highest purchasers online so it will be interesting to see what advertising shows up on the site once it gains traction.

    Check it out at :
    http://www.chicklitreviewer.com/

  17. Alfred Toh

    January 19th, 2007 at 8:15 am

    Shelfari is great, its a great example of how one can bootstrap an interesting and promising startup with no VC funding at all to launch.

    http://www.bookjetty.com is another site that is doing something similar BUT it adds a very useful feature that looks up the availability of books on your wishlist at your local library. However, BookJetty that is only serving the users from Singapore and provides availability for the Singapore National Library.

  18. nick99

    January 19th, 2007 at 1:21 pm

    good idea, but I do not think it is going to work

  19. leafar

    January 19th, 2007 at 4:25 pm

    You could also try U.[lik].
    Books + Movies + Games as Listal but with an algorithm that mixes Content Base and Collaborative Filtering and a contribution system that works in one click. Widget are nice especially the one using your library to display video from what you like on your blog.
    You can see the demo on my blog.

    Happy so see techcrunch interested by this segment.

  20. Andrew

    January 19th, 2007 at 5:00 pm

    U-lik has a dreadfully confusing design - next someone will be recommending the equally dreadful Internet Book Database (http://www.ibookdb.net/).

  21. Rana Basheer

    January 20th, 2007 at 6:57 am

    GuruLib has been around from May 2006 and has a decent list of users. GuruLib uses a book shelf metaphor to catalog books, research papers, datasheets, music, movies, games and software on the internet. Some important features that other cataloging websites lack but GuruLib supports are
    1. You can catalog PDF, DOC, PS, XLS and PPT documents.
    2. Track your borrowed books, movies etc.
    3. Price tracking feature to let you know through email when the price of a book, movie drops to a value that you set.
    4. Access to over 530 public and university library to fetch the cataloging information. If you have a local library in your area and would like to check if some of the books in your collection are available there you can add them to GuruLib.
    5. Provides a monetary value of each shelf just for bragging rights or for insurance purpose.
    Check out my home library cataloged under coolabcgirl

  22. Mike

    January 20th, 2007 at 9:14 am

    Just to add another one in the mix, there is also the UK based booktribes - perhaps they are breeding :)

  23. miffyvalley

    January 21st, 2007 at 6:03 pm

    i like anobii because it is clean, easy to use, and extremely responsive. in terms of function it seems to me that it’s probably better than shelfari, which looks alarmingly similar to anobii. the ability to list books of different languages and to compare prices from amazon of different countries is very satisfying.

    i am not a big programming geek but it seems to me that their programming has a very solid foundation, and as a result user feedback / suggestions have been implemented quickly and continuously. the only problem is that right now they don’t have sufficient traffic to generate a good list of “other books you may like”; but then i don’t see any point in duplicating what amazon is already doing. just my 2 cents!

  24. sunny

    January 22nd, 2007 at 7:06 am

    LibraryThing.com/suggest.php

    BookSuggester and UnSuggester.

    Once you have some of your own books listed you have the following additional options:

    * LibrarySuggester
    * People with your books also have: fiction / non-fiction books
    * Similarly-tagged books: fiction / non-fiction
    * Special-sauce recommendations: fiction / non-fiction
    * Most popular books you don’t have: fiction / non-fiction

    :-)

  25. Anna

    February 1st, 2007 at 4:34 pm

    The LibraryThing widget also allows you to put your own Amazon ID in the links. Did you do your homework, Michael?

  26. marcuswotznika

    February 4th, 2007 at 4:07 am

    Just want to say that you have a really informative and amazing site.
    Really helped me further, much thanks :-)

  27. david

    February 25th, 2007 at 1:23 am

    you have some spam in your trackbacks

  28. evbart

    February 28th, 2007 at 7:56 pm

    This is an interesting space, but I don’t think any of these sites are doing it right. I review a bunch of them here, before i had learned about shelfari: http://www.lifeinlists.com/200.....your-media

    And I think a lot of them could take a cue from Last.fm. I dont want to manually type in all of my books, just so that I can show them off to other people. I want to have them in one location so that I can learn from that list. I want that list to happen automatically (pull from the books i purchase on amazon), I want to be able to search that list, I want recommendations.

    If I’m going to give you my data, make sure that its an easy process (last.fm just requires a plugin, and it pulls all my music data automatically, no extra work), and then once you have my data, make sure you give me back useful information for it. More than just being able to show the world my library.

    Another example of this type of service is wesabe. It does the same thing for personal financial data. It pulls your data automatically (though it does offer manual uploads), and then it analyzes that data and gives you valuable data back in exchange. The value proposition to the user is clear, the usability is there, and you end up with a solid service that has great potential.

    Thanks for the post.

  29. nct

    March 4th, 2007 at 9:54 am

    Library Thing has one enormous flaw: a newcomer can quite unwittingly make a huge mess of things. I know. I was guilty. I was trying to add my collection of books by a noted author. There was an option to “combine” or “separate”. I clicked on “combine” thinking it would be private, for my own convenience. To my horror, I had combined all of this author’s novels for everyone in the world and somebody had to go to a lot of trouble to unsort things. They should post red flags or warnings.

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