Otis - this is feeding into my OCD. Can there by an option to turn off the update bar please? I do like it but if I am to read a book more than every two days (!) then there have to be less reasons for playing with Goodreads continually. Thank you.

I'm really liking it as well!

Just a suggestion/question, though: could it be made into some sort of widget for Blogger too?

I too first felt a resistance on using this feature, but now it seems challenging! Especially if more people start to use it and post comments like the "margin notes" as Otis called it.

I also liked the reasons by Stephen (its help to publishers) and by Lisa (book clubs usage)

Interesting. I'm sure you guys have thought about page/note updates from mobile devices. How about Twitter direct messages would as a good short-term (or even long-term) solution? I think texting "d gr p108 some kind of note" would be a great way for me to use this feature, since having an open laptop anywhere near me when I'm trying to read is a recipe for massive distraction. Jott integration would be cool, too, though it looks like it might require a premium Jott subscription. Grr.

I suppose I should be careful what I wish for now...

If you move a book to the read shelf, the progress bar seems to stay at your last status update. Do you have to update your status to the final page before moving it so the bar will show up as full? And does the update timer keep ticking or am I not understanding it correctly?

We can see our friends' progress bars from the book's page, so this feature could be very useful for book clubs where all the members are on Goodreads, particularly if they mark the book as a currently reading one and use the progress bar. Thanks. (I"ll have to let my book club members know, in case they'd like to use it.)

I have 2 books I'm currently reading. I can only update one of them. Today, I updated 'Cry Wolf' & I can't seem to update 'Future Shock'. The only update status link is for 'Cry Wolf' right now.

How do I switch between them?

When you click on "Update Status" from the home page (where it shows what you are currently reading) it should give you a drop-down so that you can choose which book you want to update. It then updates only that book and leaves the others as they were.

Hope that helps... =)

Doh! Thanks. Got it.

No problem, Jim... =)

Does the progress bar not disappear when you move the book to the "read" shelf?

I clicked on a book's page and was scrolling down to read my friends' reviews and several still had their progress bars on, even though the book had been moved to the "read" shelf. Should that be happening?

Before I've moved those books to the read shelf, I've moved the progress bar to the last page of the book and then when I move the book to the read shelf the progress bar disappears.

Charity - it should disapear - we will fix that!

I second Ken-Ichi's suggestion for mobile page/status updates...my iPhone Safari crashes every time I try to update it via the normal GoodReads page. I guess adding page updates was kind of a can of worms!

As an aside, I see there've been some requests for a more mobile-friendly version of the site, which of course would take a huge amount of work. If an SMS interface were to be introduced for updates, perhaps it could relieve some of the demands for a mobile version of the site, too. For instance, now that there's an ordered to-read list, a user could text "query to-read" to goodreads and get an SMS with 160 characters from the top of her or his to-read list? Just an idea.

Thanks Otis!