Book Blogger Hop September 30th - October 6th: Dana Kunze Holds the World High Dive Record at 172 Feet

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: Do you encourage other reading friends to start a blog or at least put their thoughts/reviews on public reading sites such as Goodreads, Amazon, etc?

I don't think I would encourage anyone to start a blog unless they really wanted to. I don't think that writing a blog is something that anyone should do on a whim, and if someone has to be pushed towards doing it, they probably aren't really enthusiastic enough to make blogging work. Sometimes even exuberance and enthusiasm aren't enough - we've all seen blogs started by excited new bloggers that are active for a couple of months and then go silent. There is often a break of several weeks and then a lone post apologizing for the radio silence, usually blaming the lack of posts on a busy offline life, followed by a promise to do better in the future. A few months later, you might see a final post retiring the blog, or simply nothing more at all. The point of this is that blogging is something that takes time and effort, and someone who has to be encouraged into it someone who probably won't enjoy it enough to make it work. There are probably exceptions, but in general, someone who isn't interested on their own in blogging isn't someone I think would enjoy the experience.

I think sites like Goodreads and LibraryThing are excellent resources for readers regardless of whether they write reviews or not, so I recommend them to all my reading friends. I favor LibraryThing over Goodreads, mostly because I prefer the more detailed control one can have over the records related to the books in one's collection, but both are worthwhile. If someone were interested in writing reviews on a casual basis, these would be options that I would encourage them to check out. There's really no serious commitment required - one could write one or two reviews and if that wasn't something that could hold one's interest, then one could walk away with no real regrets. I think that if I were to encourage someone to try writing their thoughts about a book online, I would suggest they try writing reviews on Goodreads or LibraryThing as a kind of trial run before they tried writing a book review blog.

I don't post any reviews on Amazon, mostly because the limitations they impose on things like length and affinity don't fit my style of reviewing. I know a lot of authors, and given Amazon's propensity for deleting reviews by people who know the author, I'd have a hard time keeping a lot of my reviews posted on the site. I don't have anything against Amazon reviews, they just don't suit me. As a result, I have little reason to encourage anyone to post reviews on Amazon.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: 171 Is Slang for "Scam" or "Swindler" in Brazilian Portuguese

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: The Vought-173 "Flying Pancake" Was an Experimental Aircraft Built by the U.S. Navy During World War II

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