Farewell for Now

Kythe42's Astral Library

I've been a book worm for pretty much my whole life. I've read many types of books over the course of my life, but currently the sorts of books I enjoy the most are fantasy and science-fiction. I particularly like it if these genre's are mixed with comedy like the style of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. I definitely can enjoy more serious fantasy and science-fiction though. I also enjoy vampire books, but not quite as much as I did when I was younger.

I'm not going to add any books to my shelves that I read before 2012 just because I've read so many books in my life and it's difficult to remember when I read them and how well I liked them, and I'm sure there are a great many books that I've read in my life that I've completely forgotten about.

The editions that I have displayed on my shelves do not necessarily correspond to editions that I actually own. I generally just use whatever edition has my favorite cover which may or may not match the covers of the books I actually own. If I own more than one copy of a book, in most cases I won't have multiple editions displayed on my shelves. An exception to this would be collective books/omnibuses in which the individual stories are all available separately. In this case I will probably use the individual books for tracking my reading, but will display the omnibus or anthology just as a book that I own.

Because BookLikes does not have any suitable way to track re-reading books, I have created a shelf called "all books read" in which I will permanently place every book that I have read. Books that I am re-reading will get transferred back and forth between the official "read" shelf and the "planning to read" and "currently reading" shelves.

11:51 am 4 December 2014

It's with a heavy heart that I've decided to stop participating here at BookLikes. I really liked this site when I first joined. This site was the first site to combine a blog with a virtual bookshelf and it inspired me to start book blogging my reviews and other book related things. Unfortunately over the past several months BookLikes has made multiple changes to this site that has made it harder for me to use. I've stuck it out because as I said it is unique amongst book sites with it's blogging feature. However a recent change was the straw that broke the camel's back.

BookLikes recently changed tags so that special characters could no longer be used. I assume this wasn't a big deal to most people since there weren't too many people other than me that complained about it, but for me this is a big deal breaker. It doesn't matter to me so much on other sites like GoodReads or LeafMarks if I can't have shelves/tags with special characters, but a blog is much more personal. I put a lot of work into customizing my blog on here exactly how I want it, and if I can't have it look exactly how I want it anymore including formatting my tags how I want them, then it's not worth me sticking around anymore. Fortunately I've already made a mirror blog on Blogspot, so I don't have to worry about copying all of my blog entries elsewhere.

I don't plan to close my account here, and I will keep an eye on things to see if they improve, but I don't plan to update my shelves/blog or participate in any group discussions anymore.

For those that are still interested in following me I can be found at the following sites under the name kythe42:

Shelfari

LibraryThing

GoodReads

LeafMarks

Libib

Blogspot

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