TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Book clubs, e-books, social networks: Will LibraryThing become more popular than Amazon?

By Robert Nagle

Book clubs from DearReader.com let you receive chapter/excerpts from recent books by email, either for yourself or a book club. Here’s the sign-up page for a branch library.

Daily segments are about 5 minutes long—here’s a sample e-mail. A clever idea, although really I’ve whined before reading stuff in browsers; I shudder at the idea of people using MS outlook to do pleasure reading.

But what about e-books? I was delighted to find on my new Sony Reader excerpts from various bestsellers (even if I chose not to read them). If I were to dream up a magical feature, it would be having my e-book device grab chapter excerpts from new e-books (and occasionally swapping them out). Ok, I’m not interested in reading Da Vinci Code or celebrity bios, but companies like Netflix and Amazon have already developed taste-prediction algorithms; it wouldn’t be too hard to fathom my tastes.

Another possibility is e-book chapter excerpts/samplers. Imagine having one or two ebooks containing sample chapters from the latest O’Reilly books. (You know they are already on the website, don’t you?). The challenge here is providing excerpts which are interesting and worthwhile on their own—while at the same time providing a reason for the reader to want more. Novels are notoriously bad for excerpts. You end up providing something “in medias res” without giving a sense of context to the reader, causing confusion and making it harder to appreciate character development. It’s easier to snip chapters from episodic novels —and also nonfiction, poetry, sketches,essays, comics, anime, history.

DearReader seems like a good way to promote discussion—although rights negotiations might limit the available types of books to read. Like hmm…why couldn’t DearReader serve well-written Creative Commons fiction/sci fi? On the other hand, getting the reader back into the habit of reading can result in more adventurous tastes in the long run.

Speaking of which, has anyone noticed the vast social networking infrastructure that librarything has been amassing recently? Look for example at all the LibraryThing groups existing (these are groups created by readers, not by businesses): Slashy Fantasy , Critical Look at Wizard of Oz, Dystopian Novels and a lot of others. As of five minutes ago, there is also the (drumroll please!) TeleRead E-Book Reading Club . Actually, it’s not really a club, just a list of teleread members who happen to be librarything members and we promise not to bombard you with friendspam or other email announcements, something which seems to be an issue with librarything’s competitor Shelfari.

LibraryThing has fun features: the unsuggester (a tool to find books you’re least likely to own if you own a certain book) . Here’s the unsuggester results for a Harry Potter book and Kafka’s Trial and Dickens’ Bleak House . The Suggester on the other hand offers more conventional functionality. If you like Felipe Alfau’s Chromos, chances are, you will also like Paul West, Gilbert Sorrentino and (wait, who is this?) Felisberto Hernandez.

LibraryThing embraced tagging early on and now members are seeing the benefits. By doing tag mashing, you could find a list of novels tagged with “Texas” and “fiction” of Asian dystopian novels or novels about sex with unreliable narrators (!) (Here’s a lot more about librarything’s tagmashing capabilities from the excellent Thingology blog). Or, you can browse categories or book collections of members. (Here is my profile and author cloud) . Frankly, if you are a fan of Dino Buzzati or Mutis’ Adventures of Maqroll, I will probably find your bookshelf interesting.

Other features: In addition to metadata, you can write reviews and start threads about a particular book or author. There is an early reviewers group where publishers mail review copies of print books to avid librarything members. Also, authors can create their own pages to “manage” their published books. I was delighted to learn for example that erotica author Susie Bright and I share 3 books on our bookshelves: Brothers Karamazov, Kafka’s The Castle and R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days. Well, at least we have something to talk about the next time we meet at a book signing.

Here’s a video presentation of librarything’s founder Tim Spalding’s speech to Library of Congress about libraries and social cataloguing .

I’m not going to make a salespitch for librarything. But social networking software is creating opportunities for writers and publishers and readers. Put simply, they are making it easy to discover new books. Shelfari does the same thing on a smaller scale (emphasizing both the friend and geographic component). In the realm of ebooks, CafeScribe is creating a social network to support shared ebook annotations. Civil libertarians and librarians have vigilantly fought for reading and entertainment purchase records to be protected from government surveillance. That, I suppose, is a good thing. But younger generations seem more comfortable sharing personal consumption habits than older ones (even to the point of publishing it on a personal webpage).

Of course, isn’t Amazon doing the same thing? On amazon.com you can add friends, create reading lists, birthday/gift lists and post comments and tags (and recently discuss book-specific topics). On the other hand, amazon.com’s focus is selling books. Search results favor certain kinds of books, certain books are placed more prominently than others, and the page layout aims to increase product sales. There is much less “emergent behavior” taking place.

Because of its noncommercial nature, LibraryThing seems more “wild.” Sure, LibraryThing’s reader commenting system lacks the sophistication of amazon.com. What LibraryThing has (and Amazon lacks) is a semi-complete inventory of a person’s actual library. The best Amazon can do is to come up with an inventory of past purchases, which doesn’t seem as interesting. LibraryThing’s core competency is keeping an accurate inventory of books for individuals. That might provide better insights into the kinds of books people actually read (as opposed to the books they have bought in the last three years).