Imagine a Book Club That Scales – A Book Club on a Global Google Wave.
Caterina Fake has a great name, a great smile, and she is worth a couple million. She was interviewed by Adam Penenberg for his book Viral Loop. That interview was excerpted in last month’s Fast Company.
The one thing that really tripped me up about her story and the story of founding Flickr was it started by her talking about literature online and ended with her selling the poster-child web-2.0 platform to Yahoo for $40 million dollars. That’s right, Fickr started with “a fascinating conversation with a Borges scholar [from] Denmark.” In the 80s Fake saw the potential in the social web and leveraged that into the photo sharing platform.
Her story is a reminder that the social potential for books and literature online has been simmering for three decades and no one, not even someone as smart and as well resourced as Fake, has been able to figure out how to make it work. She did photos instead.
So what needs to change for that to happen?
I was listening to Michael Tamblyn’s keynote from TOC Frankfurt and it occurred to me that ‘how to make reading social’ was the wrong problem. Reading is not social. Books are not social. Readers are social. Successful social book projects like Infinite Summer aren’t scalable. The way forward is to equip readers — not books or devices — with better social tools.
That is actually trickier than it sounds because social tools for readers are already pretty good. While drinking with friends this evening, one of them said “I have Good Reads and that’s all I need.” That is hard to argue with. Library Thing, Twitter, and Good Reads fulfill most book lovers’ social desires. So how do you improve on those platforms?
Fake:
While there were photo share sites like Ophoto, Shutterfly, and SnapFish, they took their metaphor from prior technology. They were designed to be reminiscent of pre-digital photo albums. But Flickr was designed the way it was because it arose from digital technology–in the same way jellyfish are designed the way they are because they live in water.
The book club metaphor is to book communities what the photo album metaphor was to Shutterfly. It needs an update. So imagine a low friction, low commitment, fast book club. Imagine a book club you can join in a second, participate in for a minute, then drop out of permanently but continue to receive ‘halo’ benefits. Imagine a book club that scales; one designed the way it is because it lives on the internet.
The real-time web offers tantalizing potential to fulfill this need. If you were reading chapter three of Angler and wanted to find other readers in the same spot, a yet-to-be-invented aggregation service could track those people down — both past and current — and provide ancillary material that is relevant. Imagine a reader dashboard — part tweetdeck, part wikipedia, and part litjournal — piping content at you. It would be like DVD extras, a director’s commentary, and a readers forum all curated on the spot, specifically for you and tailored for where you are in the narrative. I would sign up for that.
Who out there is going to build that for me? Who out there is the next Caterina Fake? Did I mention she is Canadian?
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