Goodbye Shelfari
I’ve used Shelfari for a bit now. It’s done a fairly good job of keeping my book-list organized. I haven’t used it for much other than sorting books into neat ‘read’, ‘reading’ and ‘to-read’ piles and to check out the occasional review before taking a book out of the library. But, over the last few weeks, I’ve grown more and more annoyed with the service. Here’s why.
- First, there were the whole embarrassing spam situation with Shelfari spamming everyone in your email contact list with invites repeatedly. But that was always a ‘someone else’s problem’ to me. I never had any truck with of this ‘friend-finding’ nonsense and I never opted-in to one. Sure, it was a irritant, but minor enough to be ignored. Besides, I was too busy moving books from my ‘reading’ to ‘read’ pile anyway.
- Second, there was the extremely persistent silliness about ‘completing’ my profile. I didn’t realize how serious it was till I tried to download a list of the books on my shelf. Apparently, my profile must be ‘at least 80% complete’ for me do even this. Not to put too fine at point on it, WTF is that? This website is telling me that it will not let me have a list of my books if I don’t give it a list of my e-mail contacts. At this point, only my laziness and reluctance to spend my time hunting for a replacement site were holding me back.
Die Shelfari Die
- Shelfari neatly solved this by bringing the problem to a head. As of last week, the ‘recommended’ way to login to Shelfari was through your Amazon account. Now, I use an email account totally unconnected with my Amazon account to login to Shelfari and I have no intention of linking up the two accounts. I don’t get my books from Amazon and this ‘improved and integrated’ login scheme is not going to help me at all. The site also makes it patently clear that while I can login using my Shelfari account now, I will not be allowed to do so in the near future.
That really pushed me over. I’m going to make most of what little time is left and transfer all my books to another service. I’m looking at both LibraryThing and Goodreads, but I’m not sure if I want to shell out cash just for cataloging my book.
P.S – I know it’s a cheap shot, but now that I’m going to quit, I realize that ‘Shelfari’ is a pretty stupid name for a site.
