Catalog books you own - and bookswap!

We're proud to announce two very big new features - the ability to catalog books you own, and bookswap.

Cataloging books you own is a big shift for Goodreads, which has thus far been all about what you've read. Though it was telling that the most popular shelf after the default shelves is the own shelf. Clearly people have a strong desire to distinguish what they own from what they've read — and now you can do both on your my books page!

We're really excited about bookswap, as now you can easily share books with your friends or other Goodreads members. There are plenty of bookswap sites out there, and we thought long and hard about just integrating with them, but in the end we felt that in order to make the best possible user experience we had to build it ourselves. And of course, once we built books you own it was just another checkbox on top of that! Well, maybe it's a little more complicated than that :) One unfortunate complication is that in order to properly do the shipping labels we had to restrict the feature to members in the United States. We hope to add global support over the next few months.

We have a theory with bookswap, and it's that members are more interested in getting free books and getting rid of books they don't have shelf room for than they are in participating in a credit system. Instead of credits, Goodreads works on honesty and karma. Members who request a book get a book for nothing more than the price of shipping & handling. Members who send a book get that good feeling of having passed literature on to another person—and they can feel ok about requesting a book from another member. All member profiles will show how books they have sent, received, and listed, so if someone is a mooch it will be apparent.

To get started with bookswap:

• Start adding books you own in the owned view of your books
• View books your friends have to swap here

Here are some popular titles available:





We'd love any and all feedback in the Goodreads Feedback group!