aNobii for booklists

By Vivek Puri | September 6th, 2006 at 12:43 am ET         

aNobii is another startup that wants to network people with similar reading habits and help them maintain their book lists. aNobii is founded by Greg Sung, and is located in Fragrant Harbor Island, Hong Kong.

aNobii has developed and extensive feature set in short duration of time, which in some areas is much more advanced than its competitor Bookmooch. You can start adding books to your shelf by registering with aNobii. You can search book by name or the ISBN number. Search results give you options to add the book to your shelf or wishlist, reviews about the book by other users, and user discussions about the book. For each book you can also compare the price across various Amazon properties.

If you add the book to your shelf you can enter your reading progress, add private note, add comments, keep track your of book lending(in case you want to lend to aNobii users), set privacy where others can view the book on your shelf or not, and tag the book. You can also set up book swapping in case you want to trade it with others. The book swap process seems to work on mutual trust of aNobii users, and I didn’t see any reference to aNobii trying to monitor the book swap process or assigning points for successful swaps, unlike Bookmooch or Paperbackswap.

aNobii generates lists of books you may like and people who have similar reading habits as yours. aNobii helps you discover people with similar reading interests as yours by displaying the shelf owners’ names in different sizes. The more similar that shelf is to yours, the larger the names. You can add other people as your friends or ignore them. In case you like a user’s shelf, you can track the shelf and you will be notified about future updates to the shelf. aNobii also keep tracks of the book pages you have visited recently.

From the customization side, users can update their default color scheme, add picture to their profile, set currency and booksellers to show, create product filters, create blog badge, and export their data into excel, or csv or HTML format., email shelf to friends. aNobii Blog Badge is a mini shelf that you can stick to your blog. You can, for example, display the last 5 recently added books. Every time you update your aNobii shelf, the blog badge will update itself. RSS feeds are available for your shelf, books you may like, shelf’s you want to track, and book discussion forums.

Overall the site is well designed but needs more work on UI. Site works a bit on the slower side though. Search box is minimized by default, which is not the best idea. There are no advertisements on site, and only source of revenue is people buying books from Amazon on clicking through aNobii.

Links:
aNobii