Illustration by Mark Tuchman

That’s the first thing you do when you finish reading a book? Pass it along to a friend? Return it to the library? Place it on the unruly pile of titles that you charitably call your “office”?

Scores of dedicated readers log on to Goodreads and share their opinions with the world. Imagine Facebook and your public library having a baby (on second thought…) and you get the gist of the social network that millions have come to know, use, and depend on. You may not have heard much about Goodreads, and the public at large hardly knows it exists, but this site has a devoted following among book lovers. It’s a powerful and, occasionally, controversial way for readers to connect with one another, share their two cents’ worth, and decide which title to tackle next. It can also be a valuable professional tool to share with your students and colleagues.

Calling all teens, teachers, and librarians

Similar to Facebook, you must be 13 or older to sign up for Goodreads, which helps to explain why it’s a useful tool for recommending books to young adults. It’s also a great way to stay in touch during the summer, because students can see what their librarians or teachers are reading. And since kids can write reviews for the site, it also offers them opportunities to offer an in-depth analysis of the titles they’ve read.

For those of us who work in school libraries, there’s the added benefit of being on the cutting edge of kids’ book publishing. I’m constantly finding out about new titles—such as Kelly DiPuccio and Heather Ross’s Crafty Chloe (S & S/Atheneum, 2012), Steve Jenkins’s The Beetle Book (Houghton, 2012), and Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles’s Children’s Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling (Laurence King, 2012)—which inform my collection-development decisions and help me make savvier reader’s advisory choices. I can see librarians going wild with Goodreads’ bookshelf concept (more on that later)—creating virtual shelves for their favorite read-alouds and subjects, and those oft-requested topics (princess books, anyone?). Every year, I lead an after-school, professional development session on the year’s best books. With Goodreads, it’s easy to pull up my favorite titles to share with our teachers. And even if you don’t want to create your own interest-specific shelves, you can still benefit from looking at your friends’ shelves. OK, are you ready to take the plunge and join Goodreads?

Dig Goodreads?

Then you might also enjoy the following sites for book lovers:

Shelfari 

The look of this Amazon-owned operation is very visual with book covers galore. You can import your Amazon purchases and contribute to the wikilike “Book Facts” for each title. This information is available on the site as well as on Kindle devices and apps.

Library Thing 

This site (tagline: “Catalog Your Books Online”) is a utilitarian alternative to Goodreads. There are fewer frills, and the look isn’t as slick as Goodreads, but there’s also no advertising staring you in the face. The basics are all there: reviews, collections, groups, and discussions.

BiblioNasium 

Billed as “part kids’ social network, part parent’s guide, part teacher’s tool,” BiblioNasium is geared toward the education market, and it’s very kid friendly. Teachers can join, generate class accounts, and create a reading network with their students, who can respond to books and post their own reviews.

A few basics

I joined Goodreads in 2008, about a year after it was launched, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that many of the librarians and bloggers that I follow were using the service. It’s secretly popular, and it’s growing by leaps and bounds. In December 2011, BuiltWith, a technology information provider that tracks working websites, reported that Goodreads had “6,700,000 members who have added more than 230,000,000 books to their shelves.” And in August 2012, the Los Angeles-based company announced that over 10 million users had recommended more than 300 million books on its site.

My home bookshelves may be a mess, but on Goodreads, they’re immaculate. Many people, myself included, use the site as a de facto home library. By adding titles to various virtual “bookshelves,” Goodreads encourages its users to organize their reading and to reflect on what they’ve read. Members can assign a one- to five-star rating to each title they’ve completed, and their individual appraisals contribute to a book’s overall rating, which appears next to the title.

Inside and out

When you register for Goodreads, you have the option of letting the service check your email or social media accounts for any members you may know. Once you have a few friends, things get interesting.

If you have a Facebook account, you’ll feel comfortable—even peaceful—with Goodreads’ design and layout, because the site keeps clutter to a minimum. Its home screen lists “Recent Updates”—the equivalent of Facebook’s well-known wall of “Status Updates”—that indicate when friends have added a new book to their to-read piles, rated a book, or written a review. Overachievers, ahem, frequent users can even offer updates on the number of pages they’ve read in their most recent book.

If you’re new to Goodreads, one of the first things you’ll notice is that it has a few built-in shelves—“read,” “currently reading,” and “to-read”—for you to put your books on, but you can also create your own custom shelves. I have one for “Books Read in 2012” and a “to-review” shelf for some 2013 titles that I’m planning to critique, including Steve Jenkins and Robin Page’s My First Day (Houghton), Cecil Castellucci and Sara Varon’s Odd Duck (First Second), and John Coy and Joe Morse’s Hoop Genius (Carolrhoda).

From the home screen, you can easily set up a “Reading Challenge.” Simply enter the number of books you’d like to read this year, and Goodreads will track your progress. There are also plenty of social features. The site lets you compare books with friends, comment on reviews, and recommend books to friends. Members can also set up lists for others to vote on. I especially like checking out the Newbery and Caldecott lists, because they highlight titles that are getting good reviews and may be in the running for these prestigious children’s literature awards.

You’ll also find groups for every imaginable genre and niche—from manga to literary fiction to werewolves—which offer a place for those with shared interests to get together to discuss what they’re reading. You can also start a book club or create a digital counterpart to a club that already exists in the offline world. I belong to a mock Newbery group that has more than 800 members, and we always have lively discussions.

If sharing on the site isn’t enough, you can also create a widget that displays your books on your website or blog. It looks like a little bookshelf and flashes through the titles on any of your Goodreads shelves.

The organization benefits alone are worth the price of admission. Actually, since the price of admission is free, the benefits are worth way more. I love being able to quickly look back at my reading history. Plus, the ability to add filters—narrowing my search results according to the number of stars a title has—means it takes only seconds to pull up a list of my “five star” favorites.

Goodreads is also a helpful place to find basic book information. Summaries, pub dates, cover images, and genre details are available for any book you can think of. Underneath this information, you’ll find reviews from Goodreads users. Friends’ reviews always appear at the top, followed by other users’ opinions.

Goodreads’ free mobile app is another good reason to jump onboard. It’s well thought out, with intuitive touches that allow easy access to just about everything you can access on the regular site. It even lets smartphone and tablet users scan books’ barcodes—entering them into their “to-read” shelves without having to type a single thing. I knew I got a smartphone for a reason.

Controversy!

Any time “non-critics” are able to share their opinions worldwide, there’s bound to be some friction. While this sort of “review by committee” approach is something that rightfully makes many cringe, it invariably holds some power, and most likely guides many readers’ book choices. The “yea or nay” type of reviews that Goodreads allows (it should be noted that the site also offers an opportunity for lengthy, thoughtful reviews) may not be ideal, but the Harvard Business School recently released a study that shows that, in general, Amazon’s reviews (which are very comparable to GoodReads’) are more similar to a professional critic’s opinion than one might think. I’m not giving up my professional reviews any time soon, but this study provides some food for thought. As you might expect, this is a controversial topic.

The public nature of online reviews clearly has pros and cons. In some cases, it has increased the tension between readers and authors. Writers who belong to Goodreads should be prepared to occasionally give their thin skin a workout. I’ve heard of authors (I won’t name names) who have joined the service only to cancel their accounts because of unfavorable (and, in many cases, unfair) reviews of their work. Stories of unhappy writers directly contacting users to contest their negative reviews are also out there. But there’s a flip side: being a member of Goodreads allows authors to directly interact with their fans in ways that were unimaginable until fairly recently. And for readers, the chance to easily contact a favorite author to praise their latest book is a genuine 21st-century thrill.

Still, controversy occasionally erupts, as in the case of British thriller writer Stephen Leather, who admitted that he’d created fake Goodreads accounts so he could write positive reviews of his own works. He also, every now and then, gave other authors’ books one-star reviews to lower their overall ranking. Although this sort of deviousness is rare, it offers a glimpse into the “book review 2.0” world.

It’s a wrap

Now that I’ve been a member of Goodreads for a few years, it’s hard to imagine going back to the days when my only bookshelf was an actual physical object. I like that my unorganized mess of hard copies has a neat and tidy online counterpart. The organizational, informational, and social elements of the service have won me over. It’s a personal and professional win. Chances are, it’ll enrich your reading and teaching life, too.

Travis Jonker is a school librarian and an SLJ blogger (100scopenotes.com). His last feature for the magazine, “Travis’s Excellent Adventure” (September 2012), was about how to launch a successful ereader program.

What did people discuss during all this socializing? One topic: How reading, by nature a solitary occupation, can also be a social one. Educational technology consultant Linda W. Braun’s Saturday morning session, “Social Reading: Inside the Ebook Book Discussions,” examined the ways that talking about books creates connection among readers. And while sharing one’s enthusiasm on social reading site Goodreads is terrific, those exchanges happen outside the book.

Enter social reading within Ereaders. Typically, reading an Ebook allows for highlights, note-taking, and sharing on Twitter and Facebook from within the book. Braun showed her audience iPad apps that take social reading a few steps further. First, she introduced two book apps—Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox (a 3-D tour of the universe, which Braun sees as the future of nonfiction) and Cupcakes! (an app for creating virtual cupcakes; the future of cookbooks).

Braun then introduced two free reading apps—Inkling (allows for purchasing a chapter of a book at a time, the creation of reading groups, and private or public notes) and Kno (a textbook app that provides detailed sharing options perfect for study groups).

David Levithan speaks at the YALSA Lit Symposium in St. Louis. Photo by Emily Goodknight.

But the bulk of the discussion focused on the Subtext app. Subtext allows for the creation of groups, the easy purchase of one title for a group of readers, the side-loading of EPUB titles onto the app (including original student work, for example) and extensive sharing features. It is not only possible to highlight and add notes to the original text, the reader can also tag those notes, mark notes as spoilers, keep notes private, or turn off the notes feature altogether. Every attendee of the session left with a code granting access to a free copy of Steve Hamilton’s (Alex Award-winning) novel The Lock Artist (Minotaur Books, 2010) and the ability to join a reading group to begin November 10th.

This opens up myriad possibilities for both classroom and literature circles. Using Subtext, teachers and librarians can be right in the story with teen readers. Teachers are able to insert questions within the text and implement a setting that cloaks other student replies until the reader has posted themselves. An in-the-book discussion could level the playing field for students who are slow processors. They could read at their own pace at home, taking their time answering questions within the text, yet still feel part of the discussion.

There’s great potential for book club discussions as well. Book club members unable to attend their meetings could still participate in the discussion within the book. Other uses? Prepping for author visits, sharing creative writing projects, peer editing, sharing alternative endings–the list goes on. In sum, Subtext allows librarians to be part of the reading experience. It’s all about building relationships with teen patrons.

On Saturday afternoon, Rollie Welch, collections manager at the Cleveland Public Library, led the session “Classic Literature vs.21st Century Novels: Survival of the Fittest.” The purpose was to share ideas for persuading adults who work with teens to move beyond assigning or recommending classics that rarely appeal to teen readers.

Earlier this year, at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, Welch led a pre-conference session in which the attendees chose the one book that every teen should be assigned to read in 2057. In other words, what contemporary YA books will survive as a classic? (At that session, it came down to a tie between Laurie Anderson’s Speak (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999) and Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief (Picador, 2005)).

The YA Lit Symposium session really got rolling when Welch shared 15 theme areas. For each area, he began with a classic novel typically assigned in school, then offered a contemporary novel and a nonfiction title on the same theme. Audience members had a wonderful time recommending alternatives and applauding their favorites. For example, for the theme of “Young Soldiers at War,” rather than assigning The Red Badge of Courage, why not try Craig Crist-Evans’s Amaryllis (Candlewick, 2003) or Evan Wright’s Generation Kill (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004)? In the Mystery category, rather than The Hound of the Baskervilles, consider Rick Yancey’s The Monstrumologist (S&S, 2010), or Richard Jones’s Jack the Ripper: The Casebook (Andre Deutsch, 2009). Rather than Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender (Harper & Row, 1967), try Paul Volponi’s Black and White (Viking, 2005) or Brian Shields’s The WWE Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to World Wrestling Entertainment (DK, 2009).

Welch believes that at least three on his list of classics will still be read and enjoyed by today’s teens–The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Even so, he offered Printz Award winner, Ship Breaker (Little, Brown 2010) by Paolo Bacigalupi as an alternative to the latter in the category of “Hero’s Journey of Self Discovery.”

The YA Lit Symposium is held every other year. The 2014 conference will be held in Austin, TX, over the Halloween weekend.

Angela Carstensen is Head Librarian and an Upper School Librarian at Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York City. She also blogs at Adult Books 4 Teens. Angela served on the Alex Awards committee for four years, chairing the 2008 committee, and chaired the first YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adult committee in 2009. Recently, she edited Outstanding Books for the College Bound: Titles and Programs for a New Generation (ALA Editions, 2011). Contact her via Twitter @AngeReads.