Shelfari Changing Course

The Amazon influence on Shelfari is beginning to show. In their first major move since hiring publishing heavyweight David Nudo, former publisher of Publisher's Weekly, to be their Director of Sales and Marketing Shelfari has announced the creation of wiki-style author pages.

Shelfari hopes that this new feature will help them "become a destination for not only biographical information but interactions between authors and their fans"

Authors will now be able to create their own pages which "will feature an open wiki in addition to a message board and a list of written books."

Jason Kincaid has a post on the new initiative over at TechCrunch and says "With the introduction of these new profiles, Shelfari is poised to become a uniquely rich repository of literary information, and has the potential to become an IMDB for books."

IMDB, also an Amazon company, has proven to be a hugely successful content portal for all things movies and it will be interesting to see how this plays out for Shelfari.

Will they eventually charge authors to have pages? (similar to the IMDB Pro model)
Will fictional characters have their own pages?
Will you be able download e-versions of the authors work only to your Kindle?
Print copies on demand only through Book Surge?

The current book social network model of readers simply sharing their bookshelves and interacting has severe limitations when it comes to monetizing and is not, I suspect, a sustainable long-term business model. By trying to build a content destination Shelfari is trying to build a destination for advertisers. Remember, Nudo once ran the book advertising world for the New York Times.

As Kincaid also states "the success of these wiki pages will rely heavily on author interaction, which will likely be difficult to establish. Without this interaction, users might as well head to Wikipedia to get the dish on their favorite authors."

The other liability, and one all the other book social networks lack except for LibraryThing, is bibliographic integrity. No other site has been able to duplicate the bibliographic depth of LibraryThing. If Shelfari is serious about their biblio portal dream then they must address this side of the coin. All the front-end fluff will only get you so far.

One thing is clear; however, if Amazon decides to throw more of its weight behind Shelfari it will be hard to count them out.

The Book Social Networking Race : Shelfari, Goodreads and LibraryThing Accelerate

As expected, the first quarter of '08 has seen a whirlwind of activity from the Big 3 of the Book Social Network world. All have added new employees and all have added a host of new functionality to their websites. Here is a recap of some of the goings on:

LibraryThing:

-started the year off with the unveiling of Thomas Jefferson's library. They have since added nine others, ranging from Marie Antoinette to Tupac Shakur, and have a dozen or so heavyweights in the process of being added.

-launched a neighborhood bookstore program which integrates the inventory of participating local bookstores with the hope that one day as Tim Spalding says "You'll be able to find a book in your town as easily as you find a pizza." About a dozen bookstores have signed up including the king of independents, Powell's Books in Portland.

-LibraryThing local exploded on the scene with some 16,000 venues being added within a very short period of time.

-recently integrated Google's Book Search API so that all those scanned books are now a click away for LibraryThing users.

-LibraryThing Zen Garden where members can play with the front end of the website and sample or create their own visuals. Many people consider the site design as the weakest link in the LibraryThing chain and by opening it up to their members to improve just reiterates their commitment to being a truly open social network.

Shelfari:

-added a blog to the mix. The blog is run by their newly hired Community Manager who is also getting paid to read. Shelfari recently held a poll among its members to determine what book Amanda should read next.

-added a mobile component

-launched a MySpace widget to complement their previously launched Facebook widget

-last week they hired publishing heavyweight David Nudo to be their Director of Sales and Marketing. Nudo was formerly the publisher of Publisher's Weekly and ran the book advertising world for the New York Times.

Goodreads:

-hired their first full-time engineer and a community manager.

-enhanced their librarian offerings.

-launched a Facebook widget.

-launched a quotes feature where you can display your favorite literary quotes on your blog.

-tripled the size of their author/book events section by partnering with Book Tour. This was announced days after LibraryThing local went live and, who it turns out, had been working on partnering with Book Tour until the deal recently fell apart.

There is also murmurs of a 4th player ready to enter the fray, Bookmesh.com. They were snooping around the blogosphere recently looking for 50 alpha-testers; the BookMesh Elites (BME) is how they coined it. They promise to add something new to the mix.

Who knows when the pace will slow. There are still plenty of growth opportunities and there remain segments of the book world that are yet to be served by the new social technologies.

Luckily, people have different types of relationships with books so there is room for multiple players and it is becoming clearer with each new initiative that each of these companies has a segment in mind.

LibraryThing seems more people-powered and the level of involvement of their members feels different than that of the Shelfari and Goodreads tribes. It is more bookish and less publisher/author/review centered. It is a new school technology with a new school approach; whereas, Shelfari and Goodreads are more of a new school technology with an old school approach, Shelfari seems to be aiming at the traditional publishing world for the potential ad dollars and Goodreads looks to be courting A- and below writers to boost their author component. They lean publisher/author while LT leans library and collector.

There is room for them all.

As Tim Spaulding of LT so aptly puts it:

"On the web, books are broken. A few small parts are solved or on their way—Amazon, Abebooks.com, Google, Powells—and this gives many the illusion that books are a solved problem. But the rest of the "bibliosphere" isn't where it could be. Libraries and publishers, authors and most bookstores are adrift, and not part of the conversation."

Amen.

The race is on.

Previous Book Patrol post "Goodreads Rising as the Year Ends in the Book Social Networking World."

The Library of Congress Hits the Jackpot on Flickr

No one saw this coming.

The plan was simple enough. The Library of Congress teamed with Flickr for a pilot project called The Commons, which basically consisted of LOC opening a Flickr account and uploading a little over 3,000 images (the LOC houses 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials!)

The goal was to address two of the major challenges the library faces:
1. "how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and
2. "how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity."

The result was astonishing and could arguably be one of the greatest cultural achievements to date in the young world of social networking.

Here's what happened within two days:

• All 3,100+ photos have been viewed
• 420 of the photos have comments
• 1,200 of the photos have been favorited
• 392,000 views on the photostream
• 650,000 views of photos
• About 1.1 million total views on our account

In their wildest dreams no one at either the LOC or Flickr expected this kind of public response.

"Frankly, none of us could quite fathom how fantastic the response to the pilot has been." is how they put it at Flickr's blog.

And Matt Raymond of the Library of Congress responded by saying "I can tell you that the reaction to this two-day-old project has already vastly exceeded our expectations."

This is a watershed event. It is a solid web 2.0 victory and one that just might expand the boundaries of social networking, where people are interacting with places as much as with people.

For the Library of Congress, and all the libraries that are watching how this pilot turns out, it is a brave new world. Now the conversation must include the question - what are we doing to bring our collections to the public? Your collection strategy can longer be solely focused on having people come to you to see what you have or in loaning items to other institutions, museums etc.

The success of this pilot might also have an affect on the Google Book Search model that many libraries are endorsing. Maybe libraries need a more multi-dimensional Web 2.0 approach to their collections, one that encompasses more than just digitizing the contents of their books.


Image from the Bain Collection at the LOC

The Presidential Book Debate

As the presidential debate process marches on and the issues seem to get less and less attention lets attempt to get some book energy in the mix.

I propose the great Presidential Book Debate of 2008.

All the candidates are positioned in front of shelves filled with books from their library. The moderators can be drawn from the deep pool of writers, reviewers, bloggers and librarians whose world revolves around the printed (or digital) word.

Potential questions:

What is your favorite book? (Republicans must give a back up when choosing the Bible)

What has the been the most influential book on politics that you have read?

What was your favorite book as a child?

One of the major issues facing our country is how do we respond to climate change. As you are aware under the Bush Administration funding for the EPA libraries has been reduced and access to the vital information contained therein has been severely restricted or eliminated and quite possible destroyed. It would seem that access to this information is as important as ever. What would you do to address this issue?

A recent study have shown that reading levels are at critical levels in this country, one in four Americans did not read a single book in the last year. In his recent interview with the New York Times Apple founder Steve Jobs went as far as to say "People don't read anymore." As President how will you invigorate reading in America?

If you had the chance to meet and have a drink with one literary figure who would that be and why?

I know how a candidate responds to these questions would seriously influence my vote.

Previous Book Patrol posts:

The Real Presidential Libraries in which I recommend that all candidates should as part of their campaign strategy have a page on Shelfari or one of the other book social networking sites like LibraryThing or Goodreads.

What's Your Candidate Reading which covers the AP story where they did in fact ask the candidates what book fiction they were currently reading.

What The Candidates Should be Reading which features Ron Paul's reading suggestions for Rudy Guiliani.

Thomas Jefferson's Books Arrive at LibraryThing

The library of Thomas Jefferson, which is the library that made up the backbone of the early Library Congress, has arrived at LibraryThing.

Using E. Milicent Sowerby's five-volume bibliography as their guide a group of sixteen catalogers took four months to enter nearly 4,900 titles and 187 of Jefferson's reviews.

Now all the bells and whistles of LibraryThing are available for one of the greatest libraries ever assembled in this country; all those clouds and stats are now in play.

Tim Spalding the founder and guiding light of LibraryThing frames the significance of this best when he says "On LibraryThing it's not just "friends"—a powerful but rather simple way of seeing the world—but a different set of connections: how you relate to others through taste and interest. We're aiming for something more than "who are your bookish friends?" or "what are your friends reading?" but "what is the world of books, and how do you fit in?"

This is the technology shining. It adds a whole new dimension to social networking, a more intellectually stimulating and, in some ways, a more intimate experience.

The possibilities are also endless. Think of all the great collections residing at both public and private institutions, all the great collections that pass through the bookselling world, and all the great collections in private hands that could benefit. Granted there is still room for improvement, for it would be great to see images of all the books in Jefferson's library and to have access to free online digital copies of the books when available, but this is a fantastic start and I trust the technology will eventually revise itself to make the most out of these types of collections.

Applying this technology to these collections instantly increases the value of them and I am not talking monetary, though that is highly feasible , but socially and culturally. It is a new format for the display of information and one, when executed properly, that strengthens and refreshes the material.

Spalding realizes that this impersonal connectivity, this piling up of "friends" is the weak link of social networking and that a deeper connection is possible, a deeper connection that also applies to the material as much as it does to people.

"What is the world of books, and how do you fit in?"

Hats off to fellow blogger Jeremy Dibbell of PhiloBiblos who lead the team responsible for the conversion. Now Jeremy and company are off to John Adams' library.

Tim's post on the topic
Jeremy's post

Goodreads Rising as the Year Ends in the Book Social Networking World

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.