I have just stumbled upon a new social network dedicated to books - Shelfari (http://www.shelfari.com/).

It was launched in October 2006 and on the 28 February they announced (http://shelfari.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/turning_the_lig.html) that they have Amazon among the funders.

It seems quite promising, but I think that whether it succeeds or fails remains to be seen since it (as many of the social web 2.0 startups) relies on large user base to be fully able to deliver what people would like to see from it. They don't give the number of users, but the biggest group there has 114 users, which is not so amazingly high for almost 5 months in function, but I hope that with the publicity it received now thanks to the mentioned announcement the number will rise more quickly.

I really like this kind of concept, it reminds me of last.fm.

Such a website needs to be free though, and the ability to guess what you've been reading (for example, if you open a book on your e-ink device, the next time you synchronize the device, it'll add the book to Shelfari, that's how rockbox + last.fm works for me) would be a huge plus. A good mashup would be to create a service looking for the recommandations you receive from Shelfari on Feedbooks, manybooks etc... If the e-book is available for free, then you would be able to directly download it for your portable reading device.

hi

I've been trying to create something very similar (http://ebookmark.digitalreading.net) , targeted solely to ebooks.
It's not as good and nice as Selfari or Librarything (http://www.librarything.com) (which the Selfari guys copied) but it's usable.
It's been built from off -the-shelf Drupal modules. I haven't had a chance to do much custom development on it.
I'd be open to working with anyone from the community to improve it.

regards

Sic.