Since I work with books and online marketing, I sat up when I saw this in the news - HarperCollins will shortly be launching a 'book community site' called BookArmy, where they aim to provide a place for people to share their opinions on all books (not just HarperCollins), for authors to maintain their own author-type pages, and for the site to recommend books to members. All as a way to capture data for marketing purposes, of course.

Um, hello?! Goodreads has been a great social network for readers all this time. So has LibraryThing and Shelfari. But I like Goodreads more, so this is a post that sings the praises of Goodreads.

• It lets you build and re-arrange your default read, currently reading, and to read lists.
• It allows you to create other categories for arranging your books.
• You can swap books with your contacts.
• You can start or join groups - authors get to create special groups for Q&As with readers.
• Authors get a slightly different profile page to highlight their status and promote their events (and themselves).
• You can recommend books to others.
• It's plugged into Facebook and Friendfeed and has widgets for websites and MySpace (and other general social networks).
• It has a great First Reads programme, which allows publishers to run giveaways for pre-publication releases.

I was initially pretty sceptical about Goodreads when I first joined ("Not another social network!", was what I said), but I really like it now (I've been using it for over a year). In my humble opinion, HarperCollins is going to have to spend a lot of money and time (especially money) to get people to embrace BookArmy, because these other reader social networks are well-established and BookArmy is going to be playing some serious catch-up to be a major contender.

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