Jessica wrote: "Well if you give yourself time frames to read a book by when you add it, I guess it would have value. "

Omg. Plan for the next 5 month? Then a meetings where you say: We have accomplished 5 months plan in 4 months! Next time it will be 3 months!
:)
I wish there was an option to make the column invisible.

Well if you give yourself time frames to read a book by when you add it, I guess it would have value.

I do believe that date added is absolutely useless/meaningless column.

Can BookCrossing export your list?

Typically, I don't add a book to my bookshelf until I start reading it. I've been synchronizing my GoodReads bookshelf with my reading blog and have created a couple of extra shelves for organization: Read-in-2008, Read-in-2009, eBooks, and shelves for the various genre. It's very easy to put a checkmark by the appropriate shelves each time I add a book to GoodReads.

There are several hundred books on my BookCrossing bookshelf that I could add to GoodReads, but since I don't remember when I read them, they wouldn't sort well, and I'm not sure that GoodReads imports from BookCrossing.

Justy wrote: "as soon as you have 50 books entered on your shelf you can apply to become a librarian and make the changes yourself. http://www.goodreads.com/help/librarian#become_librarian"
As soon as I get 50 books listed, I do plan to apply to be a librarian.

Rwood wrote: "There are some things at GoodReads that have me shaking my head. Most are minor and have to do with site navigation; others have been and are being addressed by Jessica and/or Julie. There are stil..."

About bookshelves, I've got mine broken out with the standard 3: read, currently reading and TBR. My to-be-read is broken down further with the DTBs I own, and the ebooks I've already bought/downloaded, but haven't read yet (embarrassingly, I've got about 60 ebooks in this category as I just can't pass up Sony or FW sales). And then there are the public domain books as well...one book forward, three books backward, fortunately they're not taking up physical space in my house.

as soon as you have 50 books entered on your shelf you can apply to become a librarian and make the changes yourself. http://www.goodreads.com/help/librarian#...

What's needed here is a way to import eBooks from the various eBook shops.

Though what really bugs me is finding errors in a book entry and not being able to fix it or have an easy way to report the errors. And then there is the combining issue. Why not let me combine books I enter with ones already here and then the request goes to the librarians to make sure it's correct. To be honest, the interface here could use a total revamp.

Justy wrote: "I don't get the adding strangers as friends either. I found a few people I know and added them. Of course I added everyone I know from MR, while some of you might be strange, I don't consider you s..."

If you find us strange then you do indeed know us.

I don't get the adding strangers as friends either. I found a few people I know and added them. Of course I added everyone I know from MR, while some of you might be strange, I don't consider you strangers. :)

I think it is easier to add books by importing them to GoodReads.

For years I've kept a log of books in an Excel spreadsheet. I saved the spreadsheet to a CSV file and was able to import it here pretty easily.

Recently I purchased some software for my computer that allows me to log all my books by ISBN number (I could have used a scanner for this). I inventoried all the books in my house - it took a couple of weeks, but once I had logged all my books, I was able to save the file to a CSV file and then import that file to GoodReads.

I can't imagine how much time it would have taken to input the books directly into GoodReads....i probably would have given up pretty quickly.

I just ignore most of the friendship requests. When i receive them, I'll go out and compare the list of books the person has with my list of books. If it looks like we share similar taste in books, then I may add the person as a friend, mostly so i can go back and peruse their bookshelves later on. But I don't "get" this whole adding friends (strangers) for the sake of adding people. Seems silly to me.

I don't understand why it's important to capture the "date added". I'd much prefer "date started" because it works better with "date read". As soon as I finish the books on my to-read list, I'll add books as I start reading them so that the "date added" is really date started. I'm more interested in how long it takes to read a book.

Yup, I've gotten friend requests from authors too. I haven't explored this site enough to see if it is possible, but it felt like the authors just pinged all new users with friend requests. I know some people consider any exposure to be good exposure, but it was a big turn-off for me. Now, if the marketing was a little more targeted based on books I'd rated highly, then it might have been more effective.

I don't bother with the bookshelves, except the standard ones (read/to read/currently reading). That's all I care about, really..

And I agree with the friend thing. I get a few authors I think that are trying to promote their books. I think I might add that function where people have to answer a question.

There are some things at GoodReads that have me shaking my head. Most are minor and have to do with site navigation; others have been and are being addressed by Jessica and/or Julie. There are still two that have me perplexed.

First is adding books to bookshelves. Nothing could be harder or more convoluted. At the moment I have assigned 14 of my 443 books to bookshelves. I think it took about the same time to assign the 14 books as it did to enter the 443. I exaggerate; but, not by much.

The second item that I find strange here is the friendship requests from complete strangers who have more friends in their collection than they have books listed. I grant that I am not a devotee of Facebook or MySpace and that I am not a great social networker with thousands of friends I’ve never met in cyberspace.