Mike Douton's Stuff and/or Junk

The last couple months, whenever I like to a book title that I’ve discussed here, I always link to goodreads.com and I’ve been meaning to talk about it, but you know, life and all making me prioritize my blog posts.

This is a little bit backwards from most of the other blogs and websites I’ve seen. Most just drop a link to Amazon or a smattering of bookstores like Powell’s, B+N and something called Indiebound which I’ve never heard of until I saw it start showing up at the end of Scalzi’s Big Idea posts. They sound self explanatory though. Powell’s I’m told is actually quite epic. It’s not far from where my sister lives in Oregon and my parents have said getting lost in there is a requirement for visiting the city. Ironically, no one ever links anything to Books-a-million which apparently is second only to B+N in America since they bought out Borders and they’re also the only non-B+N option near Rhode Island.

I know a lot of people like to shun the biggun stores and hang out and the small little indie shops. There are a couple I know of kicking around Rhode Island, but seriously, just because the state is small, miniscule even, doesn’t mean it’s easy to get around. New England wasn’t designed with cars in mind. So the only one that’s actually convenient to go to, isn’t a regular seller. I think they buy up the excess stock from the bigguns and sell up the surplus. That means their genre selection is next to nothing.

So anyways, it was rather automatic to link to Amazon at first. It’s the 900 pound gorilla in the room and is easy. I’ve been burned by them a few times because I can’t flip through the book. There was one by a Rhode Island woman which was highly praised by Amazon, but it ended up being about an author character bitching for the first two or three chapters about how readers who leave reviews on Amazon suck and don’t know a thing. I was pissed and sent that book to hell and shake my fist whenever I see authors I follow RT her. But it’s like going to Home Despot or Worst Buy, if you know what you want when you walk in and don’t need any help, they’re perfectly useful.

A while back I saw this announcement from the SFWA floating around twitter, a lot of the people I follow are authors so were in the know. I was all like “Wow, jerk move Amazon.” I’ve noticed other jerk moves (lookit me not swearing excessively!) by them since with ebook pricing and whatever. So I realized I’m not here to shill for people who don’t need me shilling for them. Besides, anyone who can read a blog, can copy and paste into the bookseller website of their choice. Whatever my choice might be is rather irrelevant to anyone buying things.

So I dug up Goodreads. Apparently I made an account in 08 and forgot all about it. It said I was reading Un Lun Dun for four years. If anyone looks me up on it, my booklist has no rankings or anything and the list is woefully incomplete. I think it’d be a day and a half solid to try to get all my books filed in that.

Yeah, conclusions, I got a couple. Goodreads. It’s neutral. They’ve got some good community features. It happens to be ridiculously easy for me to use. Authors like seeing users ping things on it.