A Book Isn’t a Social Medium (Yet)
In tech, the last five years (or so) have been about social. No one big* in book publishing does social well. More to the point no one big is even positioned to start doing social well anytime soon. (RandomHouse Canada is probably the best in the world.) This is a huge blind spot in digital publishing strategies going forward. Particularly as new mobile and new payment technologies – that both take the social activities of their users as a given — come on line. Social media isn’t about marketing anymore.
Legacy publishers are too focused on the artifact (the book) and not on the activity (reading). That isn’t news.
Chris Brogan recently reminded me of Bob Stein’s (and Peter Brantley‘s) message from last year’s TOC — the book is a place to congregate/the book is a social object. While that is true, my recent use of social technology has been people-first not object-first. I want to congregate with my peers; I don’t want to commune with a text (not primarily anyway). Using both Foursquare and Gowalla has me captivated by the idea of reading-as-a-kind-of social-badge (think book notifications rather than book clubs) — or more precisely the book as collection of portable data points with a social layer over top.
“I am checking in on chapter 7 of Forever War. Is anyone there too?”
*GoodReads, Book Glutton, and LibraryThing are conceivably well positioned to move with the rest of the tech industry to social 3.0 (the social network begets social data) but is the publishing industry paying attention? The three companies are tremendous achievements by themselves but the publishers appear indifferent. Are they? I am not sure… owning MySpace doesn’t seem to have helped HarperCollins any.
Apple will keep on enhancing the social toolset in iTunes and will likely make social 3.0 a centrepoint of the new tablet. Amazon will then pare. Will the book publishers take notice then or will they be happy remaining the dumb pipeline for content?
———–
Update: I suppose I should qualify that ‘best in the world’ comment. HarperUK, Harlequin, and S&S all have interesting social initiatives, but RandomCanada and Tor are the two houses I know of that have made social a central plank in their platforms.
No Comments Yet