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Shelfari is an social media service that enables book lovers to share their virtual book shelves with others, form a community around book interests or simply discuss a book. Users can rate and tag individual items in their book collection as well as discover what others are reading. It isn't meant to be a service like LibraryThing where you can catalog your books in a comprehensive manner like a librarian. At first sight, Shelfari's clean and uncluttered interface is likely to attract the average first time user who may find LibraryThing overwhelming with the classification numbers and subject headings. Perhaps that's why LibraryThing has managed to attract a huge following among librarians. Having said that, LibraryThing has the same features as Shelfari, and more.

One of the thing that stands out to the first time user of Shelfari is its visually appealing bookshelf. You can choose to organize the shelf based on books you've read, intend to read or currently reading. These can be refined further according to date added and read (who remembers?), ratings, reviews, authors and titles. Users can also create and share favorites and wish lists. The ability for users to organize their bookshelves based on reading status means users do not have to create personal tags such as "to read", which is commonly used by LibraryThing users to tag books that they want to read.

Shelfari's bookshelf is perhaps the only reason why someone will choose it over LibraryThing which has a much bigger community you can connect with. The "Explore" function in Shelfari that lets you discover fellow book lovers and books is skeletal at best. Much of it is based on short popularity lists which really restricts your potential connections to people and books that fall in the "short head" rather than the "long tail".