Over the past couple of months I've been working on reviving the PyATL book club. We received our first batch of books from Addison-Wesley/Pearson Education in time to distribute them at our meeting last month. I'll be posting my review soon, but before I do that I wanted to share my experiences with Nathan Borror's excellent http://readernaut.com/.
The site is easy to use. Once you have an account, just use the search field to find a book, either already in the Readernaut catalog or at Amazon. Add it to your shelf, then record your progress and notes as you read. In true web 2.0 fashion, you can connect with other readers and follow their progress (indeed, I may be coming late to the party on this one, because after I signed up I found a bunch of other Pythonistas already using the site to post notes and reviews about the books they're reading).
After a bit of experimentation, I'm hooked. I used the site to take notes about my first book club book, and am finding the results very helpful while preparing the summary for my review. I can record notes, quotes, and remarks as separate types of comments. All include page numbers, so as I build the review I don't even have to go hunting through the book for references.
Besides posting my own material, I've found a couple of interesting-looking titles among the books others are reading. As though I needed help finding more books to read.
If you take your reading seriously, check out http://readernaut.com/ as a convenient way to keep up with your notes.
7 comments:
Interesting. I almost sent you a really long email when you posted about this to twitter. I do like Readernaut quite a lot -- it's fast and pretty and easy. But its tagging support is pretty terrible, and that alone keeps me at goodreads (even though I have myriad issues with that site, too). I use it more to keep track of what I've read and what books I own than I do to take notes (which I don't usually do), so tags are crucial; RN's interface makes tagging quite painful and fairly useless. But for your purposes, it sounds like the best fit of the lot of them, and I'm glad it's working out.
Yeah, I haven't even messed with tagging, per se. I've set up a couple of lists. I don't have that many books in the system right now, so it may not have reached the point where more organization is needed.
I looked at Goodreads, but I think I left with the impression that it was more complicated than what I needed. Maybe I should give it another chance.
@pam I recently improved book tagging a bit but you're right, I need to take a hard look at how it could be more useful. I'm open to suggestions :)
@Doug Thanks for the kind words :)
@Doug: Eh, I don't know. You seem pretty happy with Readernaut, and goodreads really IS pretty complicated. It's no LibraryThing (which is so feature-rich as to render it useless to me), but if you're mostly concerned with taking notes and tracking status, GR would be pretty noisy.
@Nathan: I think the biggest thing that would make tagging useful for me would be the ability to tag a book when I add it. On GR, when I add a new book to my "reading" shelf, I can also add it to "history," "canada," and "wow-I'm-a-nerd." (tags == shelves on GR.) That saves me the trouble of then having to view my shelves, go to the book page, and then add tags from there (which... I can't do unless I also add a note?). I'd also like to be able to see my tags when I'm looking at a list of books. And add one tag to many books at the same time. And and and... heh. Sorry, I'm kind of a tag freak. *grin*
@Doug uh, sorry for the hijack! Probably there are better places to discuss My Issues With Tagging than these comments. :)
@Pam, no worries, I'm interested in your opinion.
It feels like tags and book lists are almost 2 versions of the same thing. @Nathan, did you have specific use cases in mind to differentiate them?
@Doug: Hmmm. If RN lists do pretty much the same thing, maybe I'll take another look. I basically just need a way to drill down into my want-to-read books somewhat arbitrarily, since that list is so long and my moods tend to be all over the place. If I feel like mysteries this week, I want to be able to quickly look at the mysteries I want to read, but I don't actually care if it's a tag or a list or a shelf or whatever other thing a given site has labeled that functionality.
Interesting post, I migrated from Shelfari which lacks RSS support.
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