Got this email from Aaron Miller and thought I should share it with you. The ReadSocial people are the same ones who brought us BookGlutton. They have branched out into new areas. Publishers should be looking at Readsocial carefully. It provides a relatively painless way to create a social network around their books, magazines, articles, etc. The network can flow across different reading systems and the virtual groups can connect down to the paragraph level. I think it would be extremely useful for such things as travel books and college guides.
Here’s what Aaron has to say:
Hey Paul,
I thought Telereaders would be interested in hearing about a new
social reading tool we just launched called Readum, which gives people
a way to annotate and share Google e-books with friends and groups on
Facebook.Readum is the first product to use the ReadSocial API, which has been
under development since last November. It works by adding a social
layer on top of every reflowable e-book in Google’s bookstore,
gracefully enhancing the Google reading system with additional
functionality, and allowing users to select otherwise unselectable
text, comment on it, and share with public, private, or secret groups
on Facebook. Twitter support is planned, as well as support for any
oAuth capable networks.Two key aims with Readum were:
1. Prove a concept by bringing together the largest cloud bookstore
with the largest social network2. Emphasize contextual commenting and group interaction (two
important aspects of social reading we’ve learned a lot about from
running BookGlutton.com for four years)The underlying ReadSocial API allows developers and content providers
to tie together any e-book or long-form digital content system with
any social network or community. Google and Facebook are our first
examples of how the API can be used, and we’ve spoken to a number of
companies in New York about integrating the API into their own
products and projects.The ReadSocial API shares some of the same goals as James Bridle’s
Open Bookmarks project or Feedbooks’ Cloud Bookshelves, and will
evolve along developing standards such as EPUB 3, OPDS, and other
important efforts, with an emphasis on privacy, open standards, and
ownership of social content. But additionally, the ReadSocial effort
brings 4 years of knowledge about actual social reading habits to the
technology, and ReadSocial plans to offer a lot on the user interface
and experience side of the equation as well.Here’s a brief video overview of Readum:
http://vimeo.com/user6312450/readum
And here’s where you can go try it out (Firefox and Chrome only at the moment):
http://www.readum.com
Aaron Miller
ReadSocial
http://www.readsocialAPI.com
