Social sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo that want to run your life for you are all the rage, but this shouldn’t distract from the strong growth of networks geared to special interests.
When I wrote recently about the slowness of the digital revolution to hit the book world, I was hit by a shoal of letters listing stacks of sites not mentioned. It is all very well extolling the attractions of LibraryThing, I was told, but hadn’t I seen bibliophil.org, an established site, or goodreads.com, a recent start-up enabling members to see online what their friends are reading, complete with their comments, as well as to browse through their entire libraries? It also enables you to form sub-groups of people from your locality or your own book club or based on authors or subjects. Otis Chandler, who founded the site, which claims 125 000 users, says, witheringly, that he would rather look to friends for advice than an algorithm.
There is a reason it wasn’t mentioned. I had never heard of it. Goodreads is one of dozens of new start-ups fighting for attention in this fledgling space in an attempt to become the dominant provider. In the networked world the winner often takes all. LibraryThing, currently the market leader, which has just linked with Random House, has only just hit 200 000 members so there is all to play for as users will not want to input their entire libraries into multiple sites.
This is a critical period in books, not least because the rise of literary social networks is happening at a time when some newspapers, particularly in the United States, are starting to shrink their review sections. Among other book sites mentioned by readers were booktribes.com (with a claimed database of 2,5-million books and which stresses its independence from publishers) and shelfari.com. Another one, whatsonmybookshelf.com which, in addition to enabling you to embed the site in another site such as Facebook, operates a points system for trading books that have been finished with.
This may have identified a gap in the market. Do you really need all the books you have read, and if not, what should you do with those that don’t go to the charity shop? Whatsonmybookshelf offers one solution while bookmooch.com is dedicated to giving books to others using a points system. You get them every time you give a book away and a 10th of a point for every book you enter in your library. It is called “mooch” because of an archaic use, “to obtain something without paying for it” — appropriately a secondhand meaning for a secondhand book site. It even has a widget that can be used to put titles from Amazon on to a wishlist of books you want to borrow.
If you don’t want to swap you can simply leave read books on a train or in a public space using the well established bookcrossing.com, which encourages those who pick them up to register them on its site. If you don’t want to do anything in return for free books, then sign up to the excellent gutenberg.org or one of its imitators such as manybooks.netwhich has more than 17 000 ebooks ready to be downloaded to your PDA or other device.
The future doesn’t, however, necessarily reside with the written word. Earlier this week I bought a book for holiday listening from the newly launched silksoundbooks.com, which boasts top actors such as Bill Nighy and Judi Dench reading uncut versions of books. It is to be welcomed not least because it is offering whole books at about $16 each, thereby providing much needed competition for the more expensive audible.com, far and away the biggest operator.
Where is all this leading? As these book sites get bigger they will suddenly realise the leverage that their members have given them. It is not completely fanciful to speculate that they could use their huge user bases to negotiate for cheaper books directly with the publishers rather than intermediaries. Watch out, Amazon. – Guardian Unlimited Â