One of my favorites apps these days is my GoodReads app.

I finally broke down and bought an iPhone, I am the first of the three Geeks to own one. Don’t ask me why I waited so long. I don’t know why. Well, I do. I’m cheap and my firm wasn’t going to pay for it.

Finally deciding that, hey, I’m in charge of social media at my firm; so, doggone it, I’m getting an iPhone. Plus I was sick and tired of my Torch’s flaming out on me.

Within 3 days I was hooked. I had managed to watch a movie, a tv show, read a book and make a date all on one device. And why didn’t anyone tell me that the sound quality is FANTASTIC?!? All of my music sounds like a symphony inside my head.

Anyhow, back to GoodReads.

For those of you who don’t know, there are two major social book sites: Shelfari and GoodReads.

For a long time I was a Shelfari fan because I liked their virtual bookshelf that I could post to my personal blog. But after they upgraded to allow you integrate it with your Amazon account (they are owned by Amazon), the creep factor pushed me away.

That’s when I made the switch to GoodReads. And when I found out that GoodReads had an iPhone app, well, I was totally down with that. 

So I devoted an entire week-end of moving my Shelfari catalog to my GoodReads account. I had always had an account on both, but let the GoodReads languish. With an easy import of the Shelfari .csv file into GoodReads, the inner librarian came out in me and I was able to categorize my books to my heart’s content.

But the GoodReads app—the app!—is nothing short of amazing.

Not only does it follow your friends’ reads, reviews and status reports, you can read the great classics for free.

Right now I’m reading Oscar Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray.” The functionality of the reader is awesome—just as good as Kindle’s app.

But the best part of the app? The barcode scan.

Click the button, hold your phone up to the barcode of the latest book that you are reading and it automatically uploads the book to your catalog. OMG. The OCD in me was in heaven … I uploaded 100 books in an hour. Crazy fun.

And if you are worried that this post has nothing to do with work, there’s a whole section on law books. I added all of my tomes to that section.