I am not a fan of social network systems, but when I arrived at the Ispra library I decided to join a books social network. Anobii was the choice.
The Anobii site is really nice, attractive and minimal as the Japanese style, but after three years I moved to LibraryThing for different reasons.
The main reason is that LibraryThing has more users I can share books with, especially in English. The other reason is that LibraryThing has been created by librarians, so the system uses some specific librarian features as the Z39.50 protocol or the Library of Congress subjects. Great for me.
I am really happy for the new choice, but I miss something. I miss the minimalism of information visualization, a clear and essential layout of web pages. From this point of view LibraryThing is a mess: you have too much information, often badly arranged. There is no whole view of the project, it seems that every single application is appended somewhere just after its creation. They have a quite serious design lack.
Is not possible to have LibraryThing library approach with Anobii interface?
Curtain of books by timtom.ch, Flickr
