Goodreads.com

A center for kids who can read good

By Mark Polanzak

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As the world careens into the 21st century, hurdling ethernet cables, growing WiFi-induced tumors, and salivating for a quicker future, one art form will continue to jockey for its place. Literature, and the entire publishing sphere actually, is taking a long look at itself and stepping timidly forward. The latest attempt by the literary arts to keep pace is the website Goodreads.com. Here, everyone has the chance to review, promote, trash, buy, sell and even create books. The website is reshaping the once elitist, stubborn and dull literary community into an all-inclusive progressive and hip nexus of ideas. The oral tradition 'round the campfire begone! Goodreads.com heralds the next era of the written word, alongside e-books, hypertext, electronic writing, and Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org), where you can read any public domain work for free online!

Goodreads is set up as a sort of library/MySpace hybrid, a catalogue of the books you've read, are currently reading and will read next. You can maintain a bookshelf of past, present and future reads, and users can peruse your profile and see the types/genres of books you enjoy and determine how they correlate with what they've enjoyed. That seems to be the Big Idea behind Goodreads, which claims to solve the difficult problem of finding out what everyone is reading. OK. That's fine. But certainly this is not groundbreaking, and there are other ways of accomplishing these goals without the need of the internet.

The literary community does utilize the online forum with Goodreads' other, more progressive, yet underdeveloped site features better. A Goodreads member can post his or her own writing and get feedback. This chips away at the time-honored and sometimes painful tradition of complete solitude accompanying the act of writing-a writer can now share their work immediately. A Goodreads member can also search for a favorite author's profile and check out what he or she is reading. Wonderful! At almost every public reading, an author gets asked what's on his or her bookshelf, and now we may know-just check out Stephen King or J.K. Rowling's profiles. Those are great features of the site. However, Goodreads missed the mark. The site does not allow personal writing to be uploaded directly; it's all cut and paste, which destroys any formatting or typographical nuances you may be going for. And many writers whose bookshelves would be of interest still subscribe to that non-web, solitary tradition and don't have a profile here.

There is fierce competition for the eyes and ears of art lovers. And as much as we redirect our attention to the greater world through globalization, we still need immediate communities to enjoy our art. When was the last time anyone went to the movies alone and just knew it would have sucked to have gone with a date? When was the last time someone purchased a painting just to place it in a drawer, take it out for personal enjoyment, and then replace it when company arrived? Music plays continuously at a party. Even video games, once for monomaniacal use, are now multiplayer online juggernaut communities. The literary arts, since the near total eradication of the oral tradition, have it tough when it comes to forming a community. Literature will go through another transformation on par with the invention of the printing press, and the internet will be a key ingredient. The slow and meek emergence of a literary community online is the beginning. Goodreads is making a go of it, but the potential is currently bigger than the reality. When literature becomes unstuck in tradition, who knows what the art form will look like. And along with a burgeoning collective environmental conscience, is it that weird to envision a world without printed books?

GOODREADS.COM