I think your analysis hits the nail on the head with regard to the strengths of each site. Oh, thank you, by the way, for introducing me to both. I’d been meaning to look into them, but then you were gracious enough to bring them directly into my living room! Maybe it is due to your influence, but I definitely use Goodreads for the networking, review, and referral aspects, and LibraryThing for keeping track of what books are where in addition to ratings.

Thank you and you’re welcome, respectively :)

I actually think book cataloging has made me realize things about myself I wouldn’t otherwise have known. Really, I had no idea that one pocket of organization in my psyche ran so deep until I found myself capturing “Bought used at Powell’s for $4.95” in Comments after peeling the price tag off a book….

A really helpful comparison. I’m a LibraryThing member and very happy with it, but have recently come across Goodreads – you’ve saved me some time experimenting, because it’s clear LT is the better fit for me.

Glad it helped! Composing it certainly organized my thoughts.

I found your site while trying to figure out an aspect of LibrayThing that I don’t understand. Thank you for your comments. I was also looking at the comparison between the two sites. Since I never did figure out that answer to my original question – I thought I would post it here. I have a profile on LibraryThing and noted on my page that two people have “asked to be my friends”. What does that mean? (I am only using LT as a way to get ideas for other books that I might read.)

Thanks, Felicity, for the comparison. I have been a LibraryThing member for a couple of years now, and only came across Goodreads recently. Based on this post, I think I’ll give it a try. I love the cataloging on LT, but would like to have more discussions and see other people’s opinions. My initial impression of Goodreads, just based on looking at a handful of books, was that it had a lot more reviews than LibraryThing.

Robin, to answer your question on LibraryThing, if two people have asked to be your friends, it probably means they saw your collection of books and found they shared a lot of them, or maybe they liked some comments you made on the forums. Being a friend basically means they get alerted when you write reviews, add books, etc.

Thank you so much for your analysis – it’s true, most of my librarian friends are on LibraryThing, while the regular folk are on Goodreads. I will probably end up creating accounts on both of them, just to test, but your analysis is definitely helpful!

I’m glad this article is helping people out.

french panic — I joined LibraryThing because one of my librarian friends was on it :)

Andrew — yup, more reviews and more members. And I don’t find syncing the two too onerous — just a little renaming and deleting of columns in excel, and the exported LT data goes into GR just fine.

Robin — What Andrew said. ‘Friends’ show up on your profile labeled as friends, and you both see each other’s recent updates and activity.

A longtime librarything user. I have a vast bunch of books in librarything. I tried to import them into goodreads. Goodreads says it supports imports from librarything; it’s right in the list of supported websites!!! But when I try the import, it fails to recognize a bunch of fields, and can’t add over half my books! This is, at best, false advertising, and at worst, straight up lies on the part of goodreads. If they can’t cope fully and completely with librarything data, they shouldn’t say they support it! I will be deleting my goodreads account, and reporting these people to the FTC and BBB for false advertising. Either they fix the import feature, or fully and completely remove librarything from the website as a site they support imports from. The founders of goodreads are nothing more than straight out criminals. I see no need to keep an account with people so completely dishonest.

As an FYI, I have ISBNS on all of my books. So it should work. Anyway, I verify the data on all of my books; it’s all correct. I strongly resent having to manually add books it says it can’t add, because the goodreads import feature is 100% broken.

I haven’t done a batch of imports from LibraryThing to Goodreads recently, but in the past it worked out fine. I had to change the headings of the data columns in my file first, but I don’t remember having any imports fail for which I had the ISBN. That is odd.

They do have a Feedback forum that is monitored by GR staff, if you want to report the bug.

Thank you for the in-depth analysis. Now I know which site to use. ;)

I may be late to the discussion, but there’s one point I’d like to comment on:

GoodReads is actually quite good at linking to external sites once you find a book. It has a little-noted function called “book links”, where you can customize what external sources of data you want to use, and it links to them depending on whether they contain the book, which is pretty robust.

For example, for me, I set it up to link to my local library and to paperbackswap. So when I find a book I like on GoodReads it’s very easy to either request it in the library or on PBS.

I really like your analysis.
For myself, I try to avoid the social networking and yes I prefer LT for that.
The only drawback with LT if you compare it to GR is the graphics. I think GR is more enjoyable than LT. But I’m pretty confident it will change in the future.

For the rest, I’ll pay the lifetime membership when I’ll reach the 200 books ;)

I have noticed that it is much easier and faster to add books to Goodreads: review someone’s list and click “Add to my books”. You can do a page full without it reloading each time. Furthermore, the import function does not require ISBN numbers as does the LT; title and author are frequently enough. Once I uploaded a file to GR, I was able to export it and then upload it to the LT because GR added the ISBN numbers. On the other hand, it is easier to “tag” books in the LT, but getting 3,500 books into the system takes a lot more time. That’s how I see, anyway.

Unfortunately, everything you had to say is completely wiped away by this phrase:
“…you are asked to pay $10/year or $25 for a lifetime membership.”

Hey, this is Tim, the founder of LibraryThing. This is a great comparison—lots to think about.

Here are some comments, corrections, etc. Sorry to be so long-winded. I should get back to programming!

I’m just a book lover, not a librarian. When I started LibraryThing, I wanted to catalog my own books, which include a lot of out-of-print books. Amazon didn’t have most of them. So LibraryThing started with library sources, and a library view of books—every book is different, every book should be editable, etc. We added Amazon later, of course, but the committment to doing the book data right has always guided us. We do have two librarians on staff, but we don’t call them “librarians.” Goodreads has a non-librarian employee they call the “librarian.” So it goes.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about tags vs. shelves. Basically, they’re the same thing, except in how you enter them and what they’re called—the GoodReads UI and wording encourages people to think o them as “boxes.” The result is less descriptive and creative, and more utilitarian.

Still, some LibraryThing members wanted something more “solid” than tags, so we recently added “Collections.” Collections work like playlists in iTunes or collections in Flickr—sub-libraries you can “stay in” and work with, or treat all together in one big lump. They make it a lot easier to use LibraryThing in divergent ways. Default collections include “Wishlist” and “Read but unowned.” You can adjust your preferences so that individual collections don’t influence your recommendations, and so forth.

Importing

To the user who complained about Goodreads’ import, I suspect the problem is that Goodreads’ is basically a “layer on top of Amazon.” Members don’t have their “own” book data at all, but just a collection of “pointers” to Amazon data, with some user-added manual data. (That’s why you can’t edit your book data on Goodreads—there is no “your data” to edit. Only “librarians” can edit book data, and whetever changes they make, everyone gets.) Because it’s a layer on Amazon, if Amazon doesn’t have the book, you’re out of luck.

To the user who said LibraryThing can only import by ISBN, that’s not true, but we should probably show it better. See the import page, down at the bottom. You can send us tab-delimited text file.

Unfortunately, everything you had to say is completely wiped away by this phrase: “…you are asked to pay $10/year or $25 for a lifetime membership.”

If you have 200 books, you’ve probably spent $2,000 or even $4,000 on them. They mean a lot to you. Entering them is going to take many hours, no matter how you do it. They’re probably a big part of your life. The way I see it, if your money and time has no value, then by all means you should choose the free site, no matter how many ads—I currently get a large movie about dishwashing detergent—they subject you to.

The joke here is that, when you go to pay, you’ll discover the $10/$25 was actually a fake-out. It becomes “pay what you want”—you can pay as little as $1. Or you can pay more. Amazingly, we actually get more than we ask for—when given the opportunity to pay what they want, LibraryThing people pay more than asked.

Besides making more money, the fake-out fee has a secondary effect—it creates a tight-knit community of smart, opinioned people. After all, since I’m not running for president either, I can tell you that people who would never spend a dime on anything online are well correlated with the people who think “gaaaay!” a clever review, and friend everyone who’s read Twilight. I figure we lose some of the best sort to Goodreads every day, but we get many of them back when they discover they can’t edit their data, or get tired of the adds and the one-word reviews.

Membership numbers

On the membership numbers. LibraryThing currently has 700,000 registered members, and Goodreads has, I think, two million. Want to know a secret? LibraryThing doesn’t have anything like 700,000. Most LibraryThing accounts have fewer than ten books. I think something like 35% have zero! Even so, LibraryThing members have more than twice as many books per member as Goodreads does. That makes no sense until you realize Goodreads’ “two million” is even more bogus than our 700,000.*

Two things are at work here. First, “membership counts” are hogwash. No matter the website, most “registered members” are long gone. In Goodreads’ case a rather relentless email-harvesting effort got them into the mailbox of everyone you know, often everyone in your address book. How many are using it regularly now? What does it say about LibraryThing that we don’t mine people’s email programs, make people pay and still nearly match Goodreads in books and traffic (see Compete.com for some rough numbers).

Lastly, I’m sorry to hear you don’t think we’re responsive enough. Our site-related groups are very active, and we rely on them a lot. Anyway, I’d love to hear more about how you think I could make the site better.

*I haven’t done a page-by-page analysis of Goodreads’ members, but I did it to Shelfari once, who also claim millions of users. The vast majority of users had no books, and left the day they arrived. And because they grew by email harvesting, there were more total “friends” than books!

I admit I’ve been postponing responding to the many comments on this post, partially because I wanted to do some digging on both sites before answering with anything like authority. There are definitely some things that are out of date in the original post, and only a few of them are addressed in my ‘update’ footnotes. This post gets more new comments than any of my other articles, and I’m glad people are still finding it useful, but it does need further updating.

re: goodreads’ capacity for searching external sites
Hi, Ilia. As you say, ‘book links’ on Goodreads aren’t widely known or used. While I’m not a GR expert, I do often read the Feedback fora and try out new features, and I wasn’t aware of it. I’m glad there is a way to add sources besides Amazon and the books already entered on Goodreads and I may try it out. However, LibraryThing’s external sources are pre-loaded and don’t require any user legwork. It’s convenient to be able to look up a library edition audiobook (a common thing for me) by clicking on the library catalogs, or to enter an old, pre-ISBN work by entering the Library of Congress number and accessing their database.

Re: Good job!
Yes, I think LibraryThing is easier to use simply for cataloging if you want to avoid the social stuff. You can choose to make your profile private on either site, but the focus on book data makes LT a more natural fit for that use.

Re: Goodreads is easier:
Here we come up against the classic “how does the user want to use the site?” question. While I may add a book one of my friends has, especially if I have a different viewpoint on it that I want to express with a review, I like to add books with a high degree of granularity: that is, if it’s a book I own, I want to add the version I own, with the proper ISBN and cover. I don’t always know how I’m going to use this data in the future, but it’s easier to capture the correct data from day one than go back and correct the data when I someday decide I need it to be right.

Therefore, I don’t often use the fast-add button unless I am adding a book ‘to-read’ that I don’t own. I don’t often use other members’ book lists to add books. I also own a bar code reader, so from that perspective it is far easier to add books to LibraryThing: I can scan in a mass of books with the barcode scanner, then import them into Goodreads from a LT-created spreadsheet if desired.

People use sites very differently, which is one reason I think there’s more than enough room on the Internet for more than one (or two, or three, perhaps) book-cataloging site(s).

Re: I hate the social part of Goodreads but that’s where I’m staying:
I’ll defer to Tim Spalding’s points about membership cost being variable. I bought my own lifetime membership (and one as a gift for a friend) a while back at the full $25, and haven’t worried about it again since.

As I mentioned above, people use sites very differently, and have different comfort zones. I would feel a little caddish using Goodreads’s site with AdBlock Plus enabled, since their revenue comes from ads and if I like the site well enough to use it, I don’t want to foil their business model. On the other hand, since their advertisers know I’m female from my profile, I’m often annoyed out of my skull by animated and/or vacuous advertising that assumes that because I’m a woman I must be a mom, or dieting, or both. That isn’t Goodreads’s fault, precisely, but it is annoying, and some users might find it annoying enough that they’d pay for an ad-free site like LibraryThing.

That’s just an example. Companies are still exploring the various ways to monetize websites, and there are lots of folks who are willing to pay for a service they appreciate. I also pay for a Flickr pro membership so that I have remote copies of my photos at full resolution. People vary.

Re: Comments from the LT founder:
Hi Tim! Thanks for joining the conversation. Sorry about the mistake about LibraryThing being started by librarians. I think that was word-of-mouth, and I should have made certain of my facts. On the other hand, about half of my friends seem to be librarians, so I guess coming from me it’s high praise!

On tags versus shelves: I’ll try to explain why this is a fairly big distinction for me. I’ve been involved in a few discussions about this, because I’m not the only tag-lover who has a Goodreads account. It’s possible to use shelves like tags, but the more shelves you have, the more unwieldy it is, because they are persistent and appear on your profile and (most importantly to me) inflate your drop-down shelf list. You don’t want to make a new shelf unless it’s going to apply to quite a few books. I have more shelves on Goodreads than most other users I see, but I still have far fewer than I do LibraryThing tags. Just as an example, one of my books (let’s use Blind Assassin again) has these shelves on Goodreads: “read, booker-winners, favorites, fiction, historical-fiction, literary-is-a-genre, novel” and these tags on LibraryThing: “aging, Booker Winner, Canada, epistolary, favorite, fiction, fiction-in-fiction, historical fiction, literary fiction, masterpiece, novel, Ontario, own, read, read by Grandma, siblings, sisters, suicide” (I try not to put spoilers in my tags, but the suicide is in the first line of the novel, so it’s fair game.) I do, as you say, find the tagging process more descriptive and free-wheeling. It also means I can pack more sweet, sweet data into every book entry.

I am using ‘Collections’, but mostly it’s a matter of using Power-Edit to move all books tagged with ‘read’ and ‘borrowed’ into the collection ‘Read but unowned’! I’m a prolific tagger, after all.

I didn’t mean to imply that LT is unresponsive, just that I’ve noticed a lot of GR responsiveness of late. I do still use both sites, and anticipate continuing to do so.

The only suggestion I’m harboring at present is that I’d like to be able to add books in the mobile version of the site — one of the big uses I have for mobile book cataloging (after checking my list of books to read while browsing bookstores) is noting a book a friend has recommended to me in conversation, so I don’t forget. I do realize this is a tall order, since currently the mobile version doesn’t log you in with your password. If I have any further suggestions, I’ll be sure to post ’em.

“book links.” This is a misunderstanding. Goodreads (and LibraryThing) allow you to link to an outside site, like a library or a swap site. That’s entirely different from getting your data from that site. Goodreads links out, but they don’t take data from other external sources.

“Goodreads is easier.” I think Goodreads has done something very interesting by having their “works” be the main search—so you can search for works and add them easily, without having to bother about editions and such, unless you want to drill down. But this fits GR more than LibraryThing—most LTers want to be specific about editions, so having a “drill down” rather than a “flat” presention wouldn’t fit them as well. Some have suggested we offer this as an option, especially for when you’re entering a wishlist and edition isn’t so much of a concern.

“I’m a woman I must be a mom, or dieting, or both At least it’s not hot dating action 24/7. Someone tell Yahoo that I’m a married man!

“Tagging.” Yeah. It’s interesting how something that is conceptually the same comes out so different because of user interface. It’s a good warning to people like me to think from the user’s perspective, not how it looks on disk, as it were. I feel the same way about “labels” in GMail. They’re tags, but the UI is crappy so I don’t use them much.

Mobile site. We need to upgrade our mobile site, although it works well on the iPhone (as does basically everything), and that’s diminished our need somewhat. We do, however, have a feature to Twitter books into your library. So you can SMS a book into your LibraryThing account while standing in a bookstore or library. See this link.

Anyway, thanks for putting up with my long comment, and for your reply.

Hm, next time I’ll proofread. :D

Thank you for all the great information here about both sites. I am starting a book club for my Master’s program cohort so that we can discuss books that we read. I know that both sites have group discussion features that will allow this, but does one site have any advantages over another for this book club purpose?

I am a LT user and will not budge; I checked out Goodreads but never created an account, and after reading this page and all the responses I know my choice is wise. I’ll stick to the well organized site with the serious readers. Ditto on hating ads.

I was interested in using Library Thing after hearing about it at a library conference; however, I was turned off by the price tag. As an avid reader, I would have gone over my two hundred books very rapidly.

I’m a LT user also, and prefer it over Goodreads. But, I’m really dismayed by Tim’s comments above: “Mobile site. We need to upgrade our mobile site, although it works well on the iPhone (as does basically everything), and that’s diminished our need somewhat.”

As an avid iPhone user, I can tell you that LT sucks on iPhone. I can search my catalog. Period. And the interface for doing so is really ugly and clunky. Ditto with the LT regular site. Yes, you CAN do everything…by going to the LT regular site, but it’s such a chore on a mobile phone that I don’t go there unless I absolutely have to, then I’m just frustrated, and usually just give up before I’ve done what I wanted to do. Six months ago, Tim posted that LT needs to update their mobile site, and it’s still the same. That’s a big fail.

LT may want to act like this is really not that important, but I beg to differ. It’s VERY important. Web browsing via mobile devices is one of the waves of the future, and LT needs to be riding that wave now, not sitting on the beach saying “someday…”

My suspicions are that LT is ignoring the iPhone/Mobile Phone aspect of their site for fear of making Amazon angry. I could be wrong about that, but that’s my suspicion. I understand how much easier it is to catalog books when you use the Amazon interface, but, IMHO, LibraryThing needs to become Amazon independent if it wants to move forward and create a site that’s technically savvy. Other sites seem to be realizing this, and are moving away from Amazon for just this reason (I got an email recently from one site that I use that boasted about how it is now “Amazon-Free”).

Believe me when I say that as much as I like LT over GoodReads, I am seriously considering switching simply because GoodReads has an excellent iPhone app, which is 10 times more useful than LT’s so-called “mobile” site. Yes, it IS that important.

Wake up, LibraryThing!

Thank you! This was exactly what I was searching for.

I don’t usually comment on sites like this but I wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who took the time to post – I’ve been on LT for a year now and just found Goodreads and was trying to figure out the differences. Thanks for such an engaging and helpful conversation!

This review has been very insightful and thorough, but it does not make my job of choosing easier at all. LT seems to be my first choice by far (I’m very pedantic about my library and I’d rather have choice and versatility than an ‘easy to use’ UI and social ‘stuff’). But a big consideration for me is mobile access — I’m using Android, which is still a ‘young’ platform, so I’m willing to be patient for apps — but if GR has good mobile access and LT not, it might swing my vote despite LT’s otherwise great score.

In general — I’m glad people are still finding this article relevant despite its age. I hope to do some digging and do an entirely updated version in the next few months. Thanks for stopping by!

Elmi — LT’s mobile site is reasonably quick to load, but it’s still read-only: since they don’t have a login for the mobile site, you can’t edit your entries. I mostly use the Goodreads iPhone app now, but the mobile site was nice and allowed me to edit lists and add updates. Goodreads has a fast development track record, so they might be a better bet if you’re waiting on a Droid app.

I was thinking about using one of these websites so I “asked Google” about it and ended here. Your article and comments were really helpful. As a RYM user I really like data-oriented approach of LibraryThing. I also agree with Tim about the fee: with 200+ books $25 is more like free :-) And it gives higher overall quality.