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Big news for us today is that our partners over at Shelfari have made it possible now to sign in to your account there (or create a new one) with your Amazon login, and, once you've done so, import all the Amazon book purchases in your history into your Shelfari bookshelf. Choosing whether to add your purchases to your bookshelf is optional, and you can pick and choose which of your purchases you want to bring over (helpful in my case since at least half of mine were gifts for other folks).
What is Shelfari (if you're not already familiar with it)? It's a social reading site that lets you keep track of and comment on the books you've read (or want to read) and share your bookshelf and your comments with others. As on Amazon, you can write and read reviews of books, but there are many more features on Shelfari that Amazon doesn't have (yet!). One of my favorites: the Ridiculously Short Synopsis, a reader-uploaded description of the book in as few words as possible, which can range (to use examples from my own bookshelf) from the straightforward ("Sam goes to the city in search of donuts, but instead finds love." for Who Needs Donuts?) to the cheeky ("A chef, banker, and teacher, all siblings, put the fun in dysfunctional." for The Corrections) to the near-cryptic ("Boy seeks Dad. He = a disappointment. So looks for better Pop & parries blow. Oh. Mom = rational but ≠suicided." for the admittedly cryptic but incredible Last Samurai).
And then, for a book-cover nerd like me, there's the best part: a display of covers of various editions of the book. Obviously, this can get quite extensive for older books (I could get endlessly lost browsing through all the editions--many of them in other languages--of a personal favorite like Kafka's Amerika), but even for something more recent like Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage there's a fascinating range of choices (nearly all of which incorporate that iconic beard of the book's subject):
Go ahead--upload your books and get lost for a few hours. You don't have any work to do today, right? --Tom
