Los Angeles based Goodreads, a social network focused on book lovers, has managed to get to 650,000 registered users and near profitability without any funding at all in their first year since launch. Today they will announce an angel round of financing from James Currier (founder of Ooga Labs and Tickle), Michael Birch (founder of Bebo), Chris Michel (founder of Military.com and Affinity Labs), Mike Jones (founder of Userplane), True Ventures, and Stan Chudnovsky. The size of the round is not being disclosed, but we’ve heard it is in the $750,000 range.

Goodreads competes with other book-focused social networks we’ve covered, including Library Thing (partially acquired last year by ABEbooks), Amazon-backed Shelfari and others.

Like the competing services, adding books to your virtual collection entails a search and a click - most of the meta data is pulled in via an Amazon web service. Goodreads founder Otis Chandler says the company is focused on the social network aspect of the service, letting users introduce their friends to good books through recommendations, currently reading lists, etc. It certainly seems to be working - the company is right in the mix traffic-wise with Shelfari and Library Thing, and growing quickly.

Ten million books have been added to the site by users, Chandler says. That’s about half of what Library Thing has to date (with a big head start).

Writing about Etsy yesterday got me fired up on tagging again, so I am going to write about at least two tagging sites tonight that I’ve been testing. The first is Library Thing, which is turning into quite a nice service for tagging your real-world books.

Registration is simple - give it a username and a password. No other personal information is requested. Adding books is just as easy. So many people are using Library Thing (they recently accounced they had 1 million tags) now that a simple search on an author or title will most likely pull the book up, which can be added to your catalog with a single click. You can also input ISBNs if you like. Quickly add tags, a rating and a review if you like. It’s fast and easy to add books and metadata.

Library Thing is free for up to 200 books, with a premium service for more books. I love the last sentence in their FAQ for pricing:

At present, a free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. A paid account allows you to catalog any number of books. Paid accounts cost $10 for a year or $25 for a lifetime. I conservatively predict the revenue will enable me to recline all day on an enormous pile of gold.

Library Thing also just released a new feature called “tag info pages” which has lots of information on a given tag. Here’s Fiction, for example.

Listal is another company that does this, although Listal also allows information on dvds, games and music. If you are really into books, go with Library Thing. If you have a big collection of all media, go with Listal. And if you have a mac, use Delicious Library, which lets you scan books in with a digital camera, saving countless hours.

I have a lot of books. And I move a lot, often to other countries. Moving books sucks and so I’ve moved most of them to my parents house in Washington. Since my parents have are retired and have a lot of time on their hands, I’m hoping to get them to do all of the hard work in uploading the initial book data. Dad, how ’bout it?

Company: Listal
Launched: August 29, 2005? (based on earliest date in forum)
Creator: Tom Mascord
Location: UK (based on listal.com whois information)

Overview

Listal is a very early beta product that allows you to catalog, tag and share your physical media. At this point it is free.

While functionality is currently limited (heck, it’s only a few days old), the site clearly anticipates upcoming features and it looks like it can become quite useful. Since there are limited solutions for organizing physical media using your computer, I like where this is going.

Once you’ve registered, you can tell it the books, music, movies and games (physical media) you own. There is also a nice ajax interface to tag items and rate them. Your listal stuff is public - ours is at techcrunch.listal.com. For now, there is no way to make any part of the list private.

Features

Features include:

• Add products via search, amazon ASIN number or ISBN (for books)
• Group items with custom themed lists
• Tag items
• Rate Items
• Add Wanted Items
• Write and read reviews of items

Delicious Monster

I also want to mention a wonderful and similar product called Delicious Monster (Mac-only and not browser-based, you have to download software). In addition to an award winning design, DM also allows users to simply point a digital video camera at any bar code and capture the media information without typing a single thing in.

Delicious Monster launched in November 2004 and racked up sales of $250k in its first month (the product is $40). It is also (or was) headquarted in a Seattle coffee house.

If Listal can become as good as Delicious Monster, they’ll have something.

Additional Reading

Solution Watch, Sanjeev Narang, Rick Abbott, Simplistically (note: works fine on firefox for me), LargeHeartedBoy, Rob Andrews, Genbeta