Let's Go Surfin' Now, Everybody's Learning How, Come on and Shelfari With Me

Today's PI has an article about a new social networking site founded by a couple of ex-Real employees. Shelfari is a place to show off and discuss your favorite books.

Founded by former RealNetworks employees Josh Hug and Kevin Beukelman, the three-person company plans today to unveil a Web site that allows people to list book titles, write reviews, recommend books to friends and find like-minded bibliophiles.

Shelfari plans to make money by passing leads on to Amazon and other online booksellers, taking a 5 percent to 10 percent cut of any sales that occur. An online ad component will be added in future iterations, along with the ability to catalog DVDs and CDs, Hug said.

"Just as Flickr was social media around photos or YouTube around videos or Digg around news, we are building the first social media site focused on people that read books," said Hug, who, before founding Shelfari, served as director of device engineering at RealNetworks.

A virtual bookshelf? What an amazing idea! Why hasn't someone thought of that already?

Oh, wait -- we told you about LibraryThing last December, a site where people show off and discuss their favorite books. And the PI mentions a few more Shelfari competitors: BooksWellRead, MediaChest.com, ShelfCentered, and the local AllConsuming.net and Delicious Monster.

Shelfari looks Web-2.0ier than LibraryThing, the Barnes & Noble to their Twice Sold Tales. But LibraryThing's founder is skeptical of their business model. He says LibraryThing, with 88,000 users, earns just "tens of dollars a day, not hundreds of thousands" from Amazon referrals, instead staying afloat through member fees.

Heck, even the charmingly retro LibraryThing (you can almost smell the digital must) hasn't seduced famed local book maven Nancy Pearl, who was given a free lifetime membership:

But the former Seattle librarian and author of "Book Lust" said she has not had the time to input her books into the system.

"I keep thinking (that) I really want to start using LibraryThing, because I know how much people enjoy it," Pearl said. "But then I think of all the work it would take to pull the books off the shelf, take them to the computer and type in the ISBN. And then I think: 'I would rather just read a novel.' "

We'll sign up for and play around with Shelfari -- and keep an eye on their blog, of course. If you've got an account already, let us know what you think.