Readium combines Google, Facebook for reader comments

That’s the title of an article in Publisher’s Weekly about Readium and Travis Alber.  Here’s a snippet:

In an unusual social media venture that brings together Google and Facebook, BookGlutton.com founder Travis Alber is releasing Readum, a new social media application that allows readers to add comments and notes to books in their Google eBooks library and easily post them on Facebook for the general public or to specific groups.

Alber called Readum “a proof of concept” project to create a social media connection for readers across different e-reading platforms and devices. “You can’t set up a reading group with someone on an iPhone and someone else on the Kindle,” Alber said, “we’re creating a layer of social connection. Why should we divide our friends and fellow readers up by the devices they use?” Albers said Readum makes use of the ReadSocial API, an application developed by her company to create a single layer of commentary and social connection across multiple device platforms and software reading systems. “We started with Google eBooks which hasn’t got any social media turned on yet; we said let’s get it on there and start seeing what kind of use patterns we get.”