I'm not entirely sure how newsworthy this is, other than the fact that Amazon has been working with this very quietly, but they have produced a Kindle based social network: Amazon Kindle: Home I discovered it via a posting on Google+ (which is interesting in its own right since I normally find this stuff via Twitter) and went and had a look. This is what you can see:
... which is to say, not a great deal. You can share the books that you've read, and the service will tweet/Facebook status update for you, you can share your notes in books, and you can also follow people. Annnnnnd - that's about it. To be honest, it's difficult to describe it as a social network since the interaction is very limited, it's difficult to see who has read things, as we're limited to initial letters, and it's necessary to expand that to see who is who. There's no discussion function, groups or anything that makes LibraryThing such a fun place to be. You're also limited to stuff that you've read on the Kindle, rather than all the books that you've had from Amazon, which seems silly to me.
However, it's there. Hopefully they'll expand the use in the future - it's clearly been around for a while as some people have thouands of followers, but equally someone was listed as a 'highly followed person' with 36 people following her. Hardly 'highly followed'. It'll be interesting to see how this is used by Amazon in the future - I can't believe that they're going to leave it as bare bones as this!
Given the "people who read this book also read" feature is now fairly common on library OPACs, I wonder if it's only a matter of time before library borrowers have the opportunity to share (by choice, obviously) their reading preferences with others using the same library service. I envisage much competitive reading amongst students within academic libraries or opportunities for a perfunctory dating service based on similar literary interests in public libraries.
I can't decide whether I'm saying this with my tongue firmly in my in cheek :)
Posted by: Sarah Nicholas | August 08, 2011 at 11:56 AM
Hrm, interesting. I very rarely use any of the 'share/tweet/etc' functions at the end of my ebooks as I have a wifi only Kindle and am thus infrequently connected to the internet at the end of a book. There's only one shared book under my name right now.
I can't quite see the point, tbh. I use Goodreads for my book related social media because I already have a social network there and it's not restricted to what I've bought/read on my Kindle and other people use LibraryThing, so I am not sure there's really a niche for what Amazon is offering.
Posted by: Meg Jones | August 08, 2011 at 11:57 AM
It has been there for a while - I ended up there I think via one of the kindle related blogs. I am not sure it is much beyond the need to have somewhere to park those notes and selections that people make public from their reading.
Posted by: Alan Fricker | August 08, 2011 at 12:37 PM
Agree with Meg Jones. Goodreads offers more flexibility. This looks more like, well, everyone offers a social network of sorts, so why not?
Posted by: Mats | August 08, 2011 at 01:07 PM