Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Library 2.0
Friday, March 9, 2007

The next big war in the book business is to see who can get you to put more of your book collection on the web. With the number of book buyers evidently declining rapidly (BN announced this week their 2007 earnings would be 30% less than previously reported, sending the stock down by 10%), booksellers are scrambling to get those of us who do buy books to do their selling for them. I know I'm not making this sound appealing, but there are hundreds of thousands who are doing it. I admit that I love the recommendations on Amazon for what others who bought this book also purchased -- it's a great way to tap into a social network of people who share a common interest. The new thing is to do this by uploading your own personal card catalog.

First, the NYT on LibraryThing :

Social networks that tap the interests and buying power of traditionally reserved groups like the bookish are a small but growing force on the Web. Ms. Havemann, for example, is among the 150,000 or so members of LibraryThing (www.LibraryThing.com), a site that lets people create detailed online book catalogs, learn about the collections of other members, discover shared favorites and swap recommendations.
Creating a catalog on the Web site is easy. Enter the title of one of your books, and the search engine supplies the rest of the details, like the International Standard Book Number, or ISBN, and a thumbnail image of the cover. Click again, and list the next item.

You can view or print your catalog instantly, sorted by author, for example, or by more personal tags like “books that mention Venice,” “books that touch on digital photography” or “books I’ve loaned out.” Collections can also be displayed by book covers.

Now, GalleyCat on the war between AbeBooks, an online used bookseller, and Amazon. This post was triggered by AbeBooks announcing a new Web 2.0 book recommendation system, "Book Hints":

As for the feature itself, well, a sample showing reveals that it's basically the same thing as Amazon.com's "customers who bought this item also bought..." recommendations, only with book jackets! And based on the data from LibraryThing members rather than actual sales data, of course. The most salient aspect of this rollout, perhaps, is the way it attempts to steal the thunder from last week's announcement of Amazon's investment in Shelfari, one of the main competitors to LibraryThing (in which AbeBooks has a 40 percent stake), by getting AbeBook's version of the bells and whistles out first.

Update: Wow. After writing this, I was doing an unrelated search and discovered that an entire page of Library Thing is devoted to people who have my books. Fascinating!

Labels: Books

Posted by B Feiler at 7:06 AM
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