SubscribeaNobii - Read, catalog and share your love for books
—by Angus Lau
If you are a bookwarm or an aspiring bookworm like myself, you’ll find aNobii be of service to you. This concept is nothing new nor is it the first one to hit the market (just the first one based in Hong Kong). There are already services like it out in the marketplace, like Douban, Chainreading, lib.rario.us, to name a few.
The basic features for those sites are book reviews, recommendations, tags, people, wish list and friends, you know, the basic necessity to start a social network for book lovers. aNobii, Chainreading and lib.rario.us all offer some sort of RSS for their forums and books. A nice little extra feature from Douban and aNobii is the book badge that you can put on your blog or personal homepage. It basically displays your book collection/wish list on the side navigation of your page, like the Amazon affliates badge, but I had difficulties locating them on both sites. aNobii even offer users the ability to trade/swap and lend books with other users, it sounds cool but don’t know if I find the value in trading/swapping/lending a book(s) to someone living too far away.
aNobii really stands out from the mentioned because their selection has depth (must have implemented all the available APIs), I was impressed. You not only able to find English books but Chinese books as well and possibly in other foreign languages but I was unable to try other languages because I do not own books of other languages except Chinese. I had no trouble finding The DiVinci Code (Chinese), 2004 Hong Kong City Guide Map (Chinese), and Korean Necessary Vocab 2000(Chinese)-stuff you wouldn’t normally find in Amazon. It returned positive results when searched with the ISBN where the other sites did not.
Yes, of course, there were a few books in my physical collection that aNobii could not dig up, I guess I can’t have everything in life. The bottom line is they cover most, if not all, the mainstream books out there plus some manga and books from smaller, lesser known and/or local publishers as well.
There is room for improvements though. One thing I can think of as I was browsing was to localize the site to complement the depth of their selection, it would really help capture a global audience and I think that’s in the works as well.
My bookshelf is http://www.anobii.com/people/aylaujp/, if you are intersted.
Angus Lau is interested in localization and development of web services in China, Korea and Japan. He is currently based in Hong Kong and tracking Web 2.0 developments there. He keeps a blog www.anguslau.com.
-
Related Posts
3 Responses to “aNobii - Read, catalog and share your love for books”
Post a comment
[...] I’m doing some guest blogging at China Web 2.0 Review and just did a review of aNobii which you can find at China Web 2.0 Review, my first attempt, so bare with me. [...]
Great recommendation..
Hi, my name is Jonney, I am from Zaire.
Just like your resource :).