Dave Winer is doing intriguing work on creating a simple and ubiquitous writing environment for WordPress websites. I strongly approve of his idea that the Web is for writers and is in need of tools for writers.
For years I’ve been trying to find a viable alternative to the Amazon-owned communal bookshelf.
That’s because I just don’t see why Amazon should be scooping up all the data that people give it for free by posting endless book reviews to GoodReads.
Well, maybe here’s a worthy alternative. Manton Reece, creator of the micro.blog social network/blog-hosting hybrid, is a keen reader and he’s built a great reading discovery tool which everyone has access to, whether or not they subscribe to micro.blog (which starts at $1 per month).
The tool is amazing even though it has almost no promotion, not even a proper name. So that’s why I’m promoting it here.
Since you can find it at https://micro.blog/discover/books/grid I’m going to call it the Discover Books Grid. Maybe a better name will emerge in good time.
So what is this? Well it’s simply a grid of the latest books reviewed by subscribers to micro.blog. You can see what people are reading in more-or-less real time, and it might give you ideas for your next great read.
Here’s why I like it: clicking on a book thumbnail image doesn’t send you to Amazon to buy the book. Instead, the link goes to the personal blog of the person who is reading that book. You see whatever they have posted about their reading experience, unedited. It may be as simple as “finished reading…” or as complex as a full book review.
I love this approach because the tool lets readers connect via their own websites, rather than via some giant bloated monopoly aggregator.
From there, if you do decide you want to read the book in question, you click the link and by default it will take you to the micro.blog catalogue entry. This offers several different links – to bookshop.org, openlibrary and worldcat (as well as Amazon/GoodReads).
Besides micro.blog, the tool also integrates with indiebookclub.
micro.blog/discover/books/grid
This site is based on WordPress. WordPress has plenty of features and seems to be rock solid. We've been going strong here four 14 years (!) with literally no problems.
But when it comes to writing, unfortunately I've long found the user interface very uninviting. WordPress is billed as a Content Management System (CMS). As a result, it's over-specified for a simple website or blog. It seems to do everything – except make me feel like writing.
Happily, Dave Winer of scripting.com has come up with a solution. He's invented a very simple front-end for WordPress sites, which just gives you an empty box to type in. That's what I'm doing now. I connected this site to Wordland and I'm good to go.
Wordland does almost nothing and that's exactly what I want: the least possible friction between me and my writing.
So here it is.
Very soon this site will get a new purpose. Related to the original vision, but fit for the current times.
Well, that's the plan anyway.
Maggie Appleton has some intriguing thoughts on building ‘personal interoperable libraries’. She attended an indie web meeting that considered this idea from various angles. As with many things ‘indie web’, it seems to be a work in progress. Anyway, there’s some great ideas at Interoperable Libraries.
Almost a decade later, I’m still waiting for an independent reading and reviewing social network. Perhaps it will never happen. Maybe anything that gains traction will just be bought out like Goodreads etc. But a person can still hope.
A fairly recent entry to the very short list of possibilities:
micro.blog has some book sharing features, using the book📚 icon as a tag.
http://micro.blog/discover/books
Having said that, I’m reminded of the “indie web” principle that the whole Internet is the true social network. Everything else is just a walled garden.
Jeff Jarvis said it way back in 2006:
The internet doesn’t need more social networks. The internet is the social network.
http://buzzmachine.com/2006/08/19/looking-through-the-wrong-end-of-the-wire
If so, there’s no need for negatively. Just the need to build, share and link.
Why we need an independent reading and reviewing social network
‘All your books are belong to Amazon’. That’s the problem now that GoodReads has been bought by the biggest online bookseller. As Brian Ford says on ReadWrite:
There aren’t many popular social sites for books that aren’t in some way or to some extent under Amazon’s thumb: Shelfari, Goodreads, AbeBooks, and LibraryThing are all owned or partially owned by Amazon. Amazon’s brilliance is in allowing these purchased sites to run quasi-independently: The illusion of competition is there, but it’s just that and, ultimately, all roads lead back to Amazon.
So can you, dear reader, recommend a site that could fill this gap, or will we need to create it for ourselves?
I liked GoodReads. But that’s all in the past because it’s been eaten by Amazon. In fact, nearly every social network devoted to reading has been bought out. Could bigbookshelf.org turn into an alternative? Admittedly, its a bit like David and Goliath (but with a much bigger giant and a smaller kid with a sling).
Please leave a comment if you’d like somewhere less commercialised to hang out and share info on the books you love to read…
This is the first ever post on the Big Bookshelf. See the ‘about’ page for more details, and stay tuned for news of developments.
The Big Bookshelf started as a project idea for Libraryhack, a web data mashup competition in Australia. We’re inspired by Sutton Bookshare.
There’s a lot of big things in Australia – a big banana, a big pineapple, the list is endless. And that got us thinking…
If we were to share information about the contents of our bookshelves online we could easily share our books with our neighbours and we’d end up with the biggest virtual bookshelf in the Southern Hemisphere.
But we’ll start small, first.
Credit: BrisbanePom at Wikimedia Commons (CC by -SA 3.0)
The Big Bookshelf 