Welcome Visual Bookshelf Members!

At Goodreads, we've never focused on our competition, choosing instead to devote all of our energy to building a vibrant community and delivering a great experience to our 5.4 million members. That said, we were sad to see the popular Facebook App Visual Bookshelf, which was one of our largest rivals, close its doors over the weekend. We were honored, however, to be chosen as their preferred successor to their millions of users. In the past few days, a flood of new people have joined Goodreads and cataloged over 1 million books. This meant some extra work for us—it's no joke adding a million books to the database in two days!—but we're very happy to welcome these new readers to Goodreads.

Since this influx of new books was unexpected, our book importer has been running quite a bit behind (sometimes as much as 12 hours behind). We apologize for this inconvenience, but we assure you that the importer has now caught up and anyone who has imported books should now see them on their shelves (We are still importing books that lacked ISBN numbers. The process takes a bit longer, as we have to match them by title and author).

UPDATE: We now have a one-click solution for importing your books from Living Social's Visual Bookshelf. Simply click the Visual Bookshelf link that says "export your books to Goodreads." Alternatively, you can paste any of your export URLs into our importer (rather than all three), and let us do the rest.

Many of you were likely using Visual Bookshelf primarily as a Facebook app. Goodreads is a stand-alone social network and community, but we do offer deep integration with Facebook through Facebook Connect, which means posting your book reviews to Facebook is easy to do. If you are already connected, you'll see an option to post to Facebook as you write a review. If you aren't, a button to connect and post will be on the next page. Goodreads also makes it easy to post ratings, to-read books, trivia questions, and reading progress to Facebook: Simply navigate to the apps tab to edit your settings.



Goodreads is much more than a mere cataloging site. We feature over 40,000 book clubs organized along a variety of topics and genres. There are book clubs dedicated to specific parts of the world, young adult book clubs, fiction book clubs and much, much more. If you are looking to exchange ideas with other readers, you're in the right place.

You can also become a fan of your favorite author on Goodreads. There are more than 24,000 Goodreads Authors on the site, including bestselling authors like Neil Gaiman, Paulo Coelho, Cassandra Clare, Richelle Mead, Audrey Niffenegger, and more. Read their blogs, follow their reviews, and keep up with all their latest tour stops, all on one convenient author profile page. Each month, we feature discussion groups with authors and live video chats. Join us next week for a live video chat with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan.

If any Visual Bookshelf members want to request features they miss or report any bugs, please let us know in the Goodreads Feedback Group. In fact, we started a thread discussing the key differences between the two sites. Let us know what features you're missing!

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