All that said; searching the web would lead you all over the place. It is much easier to have applications dedicated to book reviews, this way you do not waste time with all that other stuff. That is where these applications come in.

They are dedicated to book reviews and nothing else. They will always be on your phone, ready to lend you buying advice before you throw down your hard earned money for the next great read. Best of all, they are all free!

Goodreads

Goodreads is an awesome application for getting book reviews and recommendations. Average people, not haughty book reviewers, leave the reviews. Let’s be honest, most book reviewers don’t look favorably on popular fiction, and even if you enjoy reading it, you may find it hard to find a professional review that isn’t biased.

You can explore books based on genre. This is great if you know a genre that interests you but aren’t sure of a particular book. You can also view the most popular books overall, so you can get a feel for what the community as a whole is enjoying.

In addition to book reviews, Goodreads has their bookshelves, where users can keep track of the things they have read. This feature is available on the iPhone application and their website. You need to create an account to use this feature, and registering for an account takes only a couple of minutes. You can view the books on your virtual bookshelf as well as add new one right from the app. You can add a book under the each books page, or use the apps built-in bar code scanner.

BookYap

BookYap is similar to Goodreads, but it lacks the bookshelf. Their recommendation engine is very good though. The top of the browse screen says “Find a book fit for a…” and shows a whole bunch of types of people. Some examples are a CEO, an alpha male, a wizard and a foodie. There are many more categories, and this is a cool way to narrow down the millions of books out there and find some that fits in with what you are in to.

Once you are in a type of book, you can click the filter button on the top right of the screen and trim the results even more. There are keywords that you can remove, as well as deciding if you want fiction or non-fiction and a slew of other parameters.

Once you find a book that interests you, click on it and you will be able to see what other BookYap users are saying about it. You can sort the reviews either by newest, oldest or most helpful.

Amazon Mobile

Amazon may be the online giant that sells everything under the sun, but they started as an online bookstore, and the fact is, they still are one of the best booksellers in the world. If you browse and buy many of your books on Amazon, it gains an insight into what you like, and it will show you books that suit you.

Even if you don’t buy your books on Amazon, you can still use the mobile application’s search function to read the thousands of user reviews left on there, and find a description and plot synapses. In addition, you can use the Amazon Kindle Store to order a free sample of any book and read it right on the Kindle iPhone app.

Because Amazon is a retailer, when you read the reviews and see something you like, you can easily purchase it right from your iPhone.

Conclusion

With these three iPhone applications, you will be ready to head to the bookstore and decide which books are best for you. Before you commit hours to reading a book, make sure to find out if it’s worth your time. These apps will do exactly that!

Have you found some great books through these applications? Let us know in the comments!

Commonly all book lovers sites revolve around a community. An online ‘town square’ meet-up to see what others are reading and why they reading it. If you club together a few likeminded book lovers, you are bound to come across a lot of books.

BookRix is just such a book lovers website, a community platform where you can read, rate and rant away on books. BookRix is also a place where new authors can present their own works. In that respect BookRix acts like an online publishing house for free via the medium of the browser.

BookRix calls itself a portal on books. Let’s find our way in with a simple registration and unwrap what the site has in store for a book lover and a hopeful author.

Something seems to be always happening at BookRix. Immediately after my log-in, I am greeted with the message as depicted below.

Wow, a contest! Nice, but I guess as I am trying to still find my feet. Let me just walk around a bit and read some of the books that are available around here. The collection is about 16,000+ strong and includes novels, poetry, children’s books, essays etc. all free to read.

The Personal Homepage is usually the starting point for all activities on BookRix. We have Boxes with different content like BookRix News, Your Favorite Categories, Book Recommendations, New Books etc, which are all snapshots of everything we do in BookRix.

The Books overview page is a place to search for all that’s there in BookRix’s collection. A search or an advanced search will throw up the book we want. BookRix also has a small collection of audio books and foreign language titles.

The Community is the place to hang out and discover other readers and authors. We can interact directly with other readers (i.e. both users and authors) or join Groups like the one called “˜Give vampires a chance’”¦which reads and discusses books on vampires! Or, if we don’t want anything that far out, we can always start our own group.

Then again, we can pass the time playing a round of literary quiz that’s on offer. BookRix also has a fledgling discussion Forum that affords another place to connect to the writers and readers network.

My BookRix is the operations room. Set up your profile and build a network by inviting friends. There’s also a little pin board that we can use as a post-it peg. The pin board notice goes out to all our friends on the network.

The My Books section is an important place for an aspiring author on BookRix. Though this is a place to manage our book lists (those that are authored by us), this section also has the tools that allow us to upload our raw content and make a book out of it.

The BookRix Upload tool has a few processes that make it easy to transfer the basic PDF, DOC, ODT or any other file type and add some defining information like Title, Sub Title, Author, Page Format for the preset BookRix template etc. A press on Save sends the book through the processing machine. We get a preview of our work in the slick BookRix Reader and the book gets saved in our account. A similar process allows us to upload audio podcasts and illustrated books too.

Promote your book through the BookRix interface. BookRix hosts the authored book, but we the authors need to tom-tom it using good old fashioned email promotion or through web links. The advantage of a community can be realized for a shot of viral promotion.

The word has gone out. People are queuing for your signature and you are the toast of the literati. Not quite. Book authoring and publishing it (successfully) is a backbreaking and fortune crushing business. Just ask some of the famous authors whose books have been rejected thousands of times. So is the BookRix book lovers website worth it?

Yes definitely because it lets you test the waters for free. The book reading community comments and gives your work an onceover. Productive appraisal is a vital ingredient towards the process of becoming a better writer. There are lots of book communities and online reading web apps out there, but BookRix is a no risk way of giving your penmanship a wider audience.

If you are a book lover, ink a few comments on BookRix.  Or take a look at three other alternatives profiled by Bakari.

The best part about each of these sites is they provide you a way to create virtual libraries, sharing with others what you have read, what you’re presently reading, and what you would like to read. Best of all, all these sites have free sign-up options with mostly unobtrusive advertising.

LibraryThing

Perhaps the site that set the tone for book sharing and virtual libraries is LibraryThing. Touted as the “world’s largest book club,” it has well over 900,000 members and over 45 million books cataloged. LibraryThing allows you to use a tagging system to your organize your books. Previewing its Zeitgeist Overview Page, you can find actual authors who are members of the site. Many of them include their own virtual library for public viewing.

The member libraries can be viewed not only by titles but also by book covers, which is the best way to browse. The site includes a large assortment of literary groups and discussion threads, such as Science Fiction Fans, Young Adult Lit, Historical Fiction, and “Books that made me think.”

Adding books to your library page is as simple as typing in a book’s title, ISBN or name of the author. When you select a book to add, all the pertinent information about the book is included for you. If you’re a serious about maintaining your virtual library, you’ll want to keyword or tag your books so they can be grouped together by genre, year or month read, and any identity you want to give them. You can also rate, review, and make recommendations to other members.

Of the three sites introduced here, LibraryThing is the only one that lets you create RSS feeds for groups. I find this especially helpful for keeping up threaded discussions, because it means you don’t have to visit the site in order to view discussion threads, or be bothered with daily emails about updated discussions.

A free membership to the site allows you to catalogue 200 books for free, but the best option is to pay $25 for a lifetime membership.

Shelfari

Shelfari is a lot like LibraryThing but a bit more commercially designed, with a slightly easier to use interface. It also claims to be the largest social networking site for readers.

You build your virtual library the same way you do on LibraryThing. You can search for and add books, and you can go through the collections of other members and build off their list. It has a Facebook style to it whereby you can connect with your friends to see what books they’re reading. You can also rate, tag, and write reviews about books. Your home virtual library pages keep you abreast of what your friends are reading and the threaded discussions of groups you’re a member of.

Membership is totally free on Shelfari and the advertising is pretty unobtrusive.

Goodreads

The newest literary social site on the block is Goodreads. It includes all the features discussed above, and it too claims it “is the largest social network for readers in the world.”

There’s not much unique to Goodreads, but of the three literary sites I would say this one the most minimalist in design and approach. The site, unlike the other two, allows you to share your reviews on your FB page.

If you’re a literary writer, there’s also a place to share your own poems, short stories, and essays. This section can also be used to post photos of your home library collection.

Finally, Goodreads’s other features include a section of videos uploaded to author’s profiles, a way to swap books, and a searchable section for upcoming local to international book and writing related events.

Goodreads membership is free and ad-based.

I’m a member of all three of these sites with virtual libraries, but I can’t honestly recommend one over the other. To get the most out of any one of them simply means being active on a regular basis, building your friends list and participating in useful discussions.

If you’re a member of one of these sites, let me know what your experience has been as an active member. Has it made a difference in your reading habits?

Image credit: Let Ideas Compete

But sometimes, a review doesn’t need to be long-winded or full of adjectives and summaries. All you want to know is this: what is it? Is it worth my time? For such things, check out Blippr.

Blippr is essentially reviews in Twitter-style; short reviews of apps (software and Web), books, games, movies, and music in less than 160 characters. Other than the name that doesn’t make any sense, or the crazy noun (“blips”) that’ll never catch on, it’s a great application that will save you loads of time when searching for product reviews.

Blippr is quickly becoming a popular destination for people looking to read and write simple, quick reviews on all kinds of products. If I’m going to see a movie, I frankly don’t really care what critics say ““ they don’t appreciate the wonder that is childish humor. What I want to know is simple: do people like me enjoy this? Twitter’s great at this (and Blippr plays really well with Twitter), but Blippr’s a more robust and more put-together version. You won’t get New York Times-caliber reviews, but most of the time you don’t need them anyway. If all you want to know is “should I check this out?” then Blippr’s got you covered.

You can sign in to Blippr with Friendfeed, Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Facebook, Google, Yahoo and OpenID. The advantage here is two-fold: you don’t need a new set of credentials, and most of the linked networks allow you to choose to publish your blips every time you review an item. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Blippr’s integration with other services is one of the best parts of the site, and isn’t just limited to the login screen. One of the best, and smartest thing about Blippr is that it integrates with other media-related services. Blippr can add your Netflix movies to your “Stuff,” see what you’re reading on GoodReads, and pull your listening habits in from Last.fm. Once you link these accounts to Blippr, it will automatically create a library for you.

Once you’re logged in and set up, start poking through the site’s categories ““ movies, books, music, games, and apps. Each of these categories has sections for reviews, “recommended” (based on your reviews, and what similar people are reviewing — something like Last.FM’s artist recommendations), and several other sections that let you look through and add to the database on Blippr. You can search through the site’s coffers to see what people are watching, reading, listening to and playing with. For each item you come across, you’ll see a series of short, 160-or-fewer-character reviews along with the users’ overall opinions of Blippr.

If you bump into something you’ve seen, read, heard or tried; posting a review is easy. You get four options: “I love it!” “I like it,” “I dislike it,” or “I hate it!”. Then, you have 160 characters to explain yourself. This makes the reviews short, easy to read, and easy to sort by people’s opinions ““ sort of an “out-of-5″ review but with a better set of choices.

The brevity of the reviews is the best part of Blippr ““ you can figure out what hundreds of people think in the time it would take to read only a few on a site like Amazon or Newegg. Blippr’s like Twitter in that aspect ““ nothing in-depth, but perfect for figuring out what’s on the tip of everyone’s tongues. If you’re trying to figure out which movie’s perfect for you this Friday, or which album you should buy from the Beastie Boys, Blippr’s a quick and easy way to take the pulse of a product, without tons of leg work on your part.

Every product, book, movie, or whatever has links to buy it and be saved it to “My Stuff”, which will then helps Blippr figure out what you like and tailor recommendations suited to your taste, or look through similar products to the one you’re looking at. It’s a great way to find new products, and to figure out what other people like you are enjoying.

The more you add to your “Stuff” and the more items you review, the recommendations will automatically get better and you’ll have a great organizer of all your media on Blippr. Knowing what you’ve seen, what you’ve read, and what else you might like is a great tool. With these integrations, Blippr works even faster to bring you suitable recommendations closer to your choice in movies, books and lots more stuff!

Where do you go to figure out what to read, watch, hear or use? We’d love to know where you get your recommendations and reviews from. Share them with us in the comments — 160 characters or less!

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Photo: Andrei Z

So what’s a book review? And what makes a book review good or bad? The first question has a simple answer. A book review is a form of literary criticism in which a book is analyzed based on content, style, and originality. Its length can vary from a single paragraph to a substantial essay. But what makes a book review good is totally up to the reader ““ personal taste. While some may prefer a short plot summary, some may prefer a long essay on the concepts presented in the book, along with the author’s personal opinions.

That’s why the order in which these sites are presented does not matter.

The New York Times

The New York Times, while some critics say it has fallen from the top ranks, still has capable writers which undoubtedly have the skills necessary for writing book reviews. Writing book reviews is actually very hard and requires the utmost attention to detail as well as an encompassing knowledge of other literary works. The reviewer must analyze even the faintest clues, implied meanings provided by the book author, decide on their importance and meaningfulness to the story. He has to address complex issues such as plagiarism and decide on the validity of the ideas and points expressed.

The New York Times presents us with book reviews situated somewhere in the middle, between a plot summary and a ten page essay, with most reviews situated around 1000 words. The quality varies from writer to writer but most of them provide an insightful view for the proto-reader. They have one of the largest number of reviews, which means you’re going to visit them sooner or later. Overall, The New York Times Book section receives a warm recommendation. Visit it here.

Also worth mentioning ““ capturing almost the same type of writing and quality ““ are the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and The Telegraph.

AllReaders.com

Next up is AllReaders.com, with a design stuck in 1999, the apogee of humanity according to the Matrix. Their library is comprehensive and the search engine highly customizable, but the reviews are generally short and superficial. “Gordon invites readers, authors and publishers to enter books and reviews in a process that takes about 10 minutes,” and that’s exactly the problem with the site. Instead of knowledgeable readers and writers, you will sometimes risk finding a common illiterate species: the internet troll. The advantage of reading through many viewpoints is undeniable so go on and visit it here.

BookPage.com

BookPage gives us a consistent library of well written book reviews, including a section on children’s books, blogs and a newsletter. Nothing remarkable, but still worth a read. Visit it here.

BookReporter.com

Just slightly better organized than the other sites I visited, bookreporter.com hosts reviews about 500 words long, polls, blogs and various contests aimed at the diligent reader.

As always, you’re invited to join the conversation, so post in the comments suggestions on other sites you’d like to read before buying a book as well as impressions on the ones mentioned in this article. You could even recommend us a book!