Litrate: A Better Goodreads?

I came across Litrate last night as I was browsing some Kickstarter projects and the idea caught my attention right away. Litrate calls itself a ‘social media and online cataloging site for readers and book lovers’. Of course the first thing I thought about was Goodreads. Afterall that’s exactly what Goodreads is.

The next thing that caught my attention was the project starter, Ashley (if you’re a book blogger, you SHOULD know who Ashley is), who also developed the Ultimate Book Blogger, the very plugin I use on MysterySequels for my book reviews. Since I love this plugin and I’ve had several dealings with Ashley over the email, I started to pay more attention to her pet project Litrate .

First of all, what is Kickstarter? It is an online community where people with creative ideas in all walks of life can start a project and bring it to fruition with the help of ‘backers’.  If you want to make a film, create an online game, start your own music band or publish a new book, Kickstarter allows you to make your dreams come true through funding.

So now for Litrate. It is quite an ambitious Kickstarter project started by Ashley and her husband that promises to be better than Goodreads – which currently is the major go-to place for any book lover to talk about books, add books to their shelves and review books for others to enjoy.

Litrate will have pretty much all the features that Goodreads has, with a few extras, such as

– Allowing for half star ratings (I still don’t understand why Goodreads doesn’t allow that)

– Being away from Amazon (Goodreads has been recently bought by Amazon, and many people don’t like it as they feel Goodreads has become a faceless big company with no personality)

– Allowing for private reviews (on Goodreads you publish the review, everyone can see it, which might not be so great if your review is less than stellar for the book),

and a few other perks that seem worthwhile checking out.

If all goes well, the new online community for book lovers should launch January 2015. The goal for the KickStarter project is 16,000 dollars and with only 23 days to go, there is quite a lot of money to come up with. I’m a backer as well (granted with a smaller sum, but still, every amount counts) and I really hope she will get her project fully funded as Litrate seems to be something really worthwhile for every book lover.

I do trust Ashley and hope she will get her project underway.

Good luck to Ashley and Litrate!

[related-posts]