Somehow, reading books seems to have gotten a bad rap," says Otis Chandler. That's why he's launched Goodreads.com, a new online networking website with a simple aim: to "make reading fun again." Goodreads— formerly "Goodreadz" (until Chandler swapped the z for an s so as to give the site the impression of "not being run from someone's living room")—is, to my mind, a thinking man's MySpace.

A notable difference is that here, there's little room for the schizoid posturing that makes most online profiles insufferable. Goodreads profiles consist simply of "books"—organized into "shelves" of the user's choosing—and "friends." Users join, list recent reads (which they can rate with 1-5 stars), post short, optional opinions about books, and investigate their friends' reading habits. "When I want to know what books to read, I'd rather turn to a friend than any random person, bestseller list, or algorithm," Chandler said. Who wouldn't?—Mythili Rao