2007 will go down as the year book social networking got shot out of the canon and as the year comes to a close we see Goodreads rising, Shelfari stumbling and LibraryThing coasting along.
Goodreads ended the year with an estimated $750,000 infusion via a group of angels consisting of "six influential Internet pioneers." Murmurings could be heard back in October when Marc Hedlund at O'Reilly Radar commented on how he and a bunch of his friends were corralled into joining Goodreads. Hedlund confessed his love for LibrayThing's blog but admits he isn't very fond of its product. Hedlund ended the year with a post that included this little turnaround "My friends keep joining Goodreads but my heart still lies with LibraryThing. Come on, peoples!"
With the new Goodreads investment the field is begin to show stronger parallels to the online bookselling world. AbeBooks invested in LibrayThing, Amazon with Shelfari and now GoodReads goes the VC/Angel route which mirrors the path that Alibris, the other major online book site, took.
Shelfari, on the other hand, ended the year on a sour note. Yes, they did go live with their new and improved redesign but they are still suffering from their uncalled for spamming and astroturfing campaign that made waves this fall. It is still to early to tell if they can bounce back from the damage inflicted by these expeditions but it is clear that these campaigns tainted their meteoric growth and has left a few of us scratching our heads as to what is going on over there. They are still; however, very well positioned.
Then there is LibraryThing which was first-in and continues to lead the pack in terms of traffic, books listed and good karma. Founder Tim Spalding continues to innovate and keep the process open and above board. LibraryThing is clearly the best thing that has happened to AbeBooks in some time though I am still not convinced that AbeBooks is best thing to happen to LibraryThing.
Tim O'Reilly leaves a interesting comment to Hedlund's year end post saying:
"what all these sites need to do is get together, so that you can share books (and friends) across all three services. I sure don't want to put books in multiple places."
I can't imagine LibraryThing, with its sizable investment from AbeBooks, and Shelfari, which has recently been sprinkled with a little Amazon money, will be open to sharing resources but there is a way for this to work. The model is already in place in the non-new book world where there are services where booksellers send one data file to one place then that file is sent in the proper format to the multiple sales channels. So ultimately you would maintain your library, reviews, comments etc. at one place then upload that file to your data distributor and they would send it to the other social book network sites.
This also raises another issue regarding sharing data between the sites. What if Amazon decides to really get behind Shelfari and not allow any of its competitors access to the vital data Amazon supplies via Amazon web services. As I far as I can tell all the book social networks use Amazon web services to feed their ISBN lookups. Might be a reach but it is a possibility.
Though 2008 promises to be a significant year as the field fills out, the lines get drawn, and the race to win the hearts and minds (and libraries) of tech-savy readers continues, we need to keep in mind that the whole social networking phenomena is a bit overextended in it's current state. And when it comes to the world of books it presents its own unique challenges, for the very act of reading a book is a solitary experience and any attempt to socialize it will have inherent obstacles.
I also believe 2008 will also be the year that these technologies become a little less 'social' as they explore potential applications for bookstores, libraries, OCLC, and collectors.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Goodreads Rising as the Year Ends in the Book Social Networking World
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1 comments:
Thanks for the interesting analysis. Apart from the principals, there aren't many people thinking about the little "social cataloging" industry. I'm going to keep chewing it over but, for now, I'll just leave a note on why data-exchange is tough.
The trick is that the data models are rather different. LibraryThing stores books one-by-one, while other solutions have more of a checklist approach, drawing from Amazon exlusively and based on Amazon's ISBN-clone ASIN, and preventing users from editing the bibliographic data.
LibraryThing, by contrast, uses hundreds of other sources, mostly libraries, including many from outside of Amazon's four languages and even in other scripts, and does not rely on an ISBN checklist. Instead, each book in each member's catalog is its own beast, with its own editable data.
The ISBN issue is important to our members, about 25% of whose books lack an ISBN. This is probably both a symptom and a cause of a demographic difference between LT and its competitors; GR and S skew young; young people have fewer non-ISBN books.
Unfortunately, it's not just the lack of an ISBN, for even if two books share something like an LCCN, the libraries will have cataloged them differently, and these differences are important to our members. They want their Deweys and LCCs, their Swedish descriptions and headings, and so forth.
The difference makes it hard to trade data. The problem isn't just the lack of an automated way. People already manually synch across the three systems, all of which offer import and export functionality (unlike the Facebook aps, btw). Unfortunately, all systems work exclusively by ISBN. This means that moving from G or S to LT works fine; as long as you select Amazon as your source the data should be identical. But moving from LibraryThing doesn't work as well, because GR and Shelfari can't parse books without an ISBN, and, when an ISBN is present, data differences introduced by users or coming from a non-Amazon source are erased.
Unfortunately, the issue reflects real differences between the sites and would be hard to overcome. The incentive for GR or S to improve their bibliographic tools is slight. Apart from the steep learning curve--we just spent 6 months revamping our library-data solution and library data is a core strength of our team--their current users do not demand it, those people mostly having chosen LT in the first place. Further, moving from a checklist to a full system is like upgrading from a goldfish to a blue whale. LibraryThing has about 2.5 million unique ISBNs, but almost 22 million books cataloged. We're all having problems scaling fast enough. I doubt that expanding the central database structrue by ten-fold is very appealing.
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