View Single Post
Old 02-14-2012, 08:41 PM   #32
Elfwreck
Grand Sorcerer
Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Elfwreck's Avatar
 
Posts: 5,185
Karma: 25133758
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: SF Bay Area, California, USA
Device: Pocketbook Touch HD3 (Past: Kobo Mini, PEZ, PRS-505, Clié)
I could see a use in sharing reading passages with my friends, but not with the entire web-enabled world. (I don't have a Facebook account, so any social features tied to that would be useless to me no matter how much I was interested.)

I can see the social side of reading being good for book clubs and students, who are either reading the same books, or looking to each other for recommendations. But I don't see a point in open-crowdsourcing reading recs; my tastes and book-buying habits are a bit too weird for that.

I'm glad someone enjoys the social features some ebook sites offer. I don't believe they'll be the salvation some publishers & bookstores want... until a site can deal with sideloaded ebooks, the social side will be a walled-garden effect, and even Amazon just doesn't have enough market share for that. For example, people might want to chat about Dickens... but some of them will get their Dickens from Amazon, and some will get it from Gutenberg, and some from Kobo, and some from Mobileread; if the site only allows editions from one source, it's cutting out a lot of readers. The only current setting that can rely on people having the exact same digital editions are college-student bookstores... and those are readers who are mostly just tolerating a need for the text; they aren't going to stick around and discuss it again next semester.
Elfwreck is offline   Reply With Quote