Recommend online book discussion sites or apps

Q1: Can anyone recommend some online book club/book discussion sites you are aware of, which ones you prefer, and why?

Q2: A related question is if you've leveraged some of the features built into popular e-reading apps/devices to contribute to online book discussion, and how that experience went? For instance, the ability to make Kindle annotations public and see the annotations of others could be a useful capability where, combined with a discussion forum, you could have detailed discussions about excerpts and passages from a book.


Background
In addition to the forums we have here on MR, I am looking to join an online book discussion group that is heavily moderated, allows for special-interest book discussion groups to form, and maybe one that has more advanced features (vs merely threaded BB discussions) to collaboratively comment and discuss ebooks. I might be willing to pay for a subscription-type service that offers these features, depending what they offer. Obviously some people are leveraging existing social platforms like Facebook, and basic support for this is built into some of our popular e-ink readers. Some are using the group discussion feature built into Goodreads, or similar sites. That sounds somewhat interesting as I'm already a member of Goodreads, but would like to hear from some who have tried it. Also it looks like there are some specialized book discussion platforms--one I ran across is "CommentPress"--that allow for advanced collaborative discussion and commenting directly with the text of an ebook.

[maddz]

Not specifically a book discussion site, but I hang out on LibraryThing. The focus there is on cataloguing books, but a fair amount of reviews and discussion goes on as well.

[ZodWallop]

I'll second LibraryThing. I don't hang out there like I used to, but have had very good discussions there.

There's also GoodReads, which is way more advanced in some features than LibraryThing. But I find the site a little too Facebook-y. Seeing things like .gifs in reviews makes me feel that it's more about the personalities of the posters than it is about books or their contents.

[maddz]

I've never bothered with joining GR - I just use it as a source of covers as their edition layer is much better than LT and links covers to specific editions. The site has always seemed to me to be more focussed on the social media side of reading, and I'm more of a loner.

Originally Posted by maddz

I hang out on LibraryThing. The focus there is on cataloguing books, but a fair amount of reviews and discussion goes on as well.

So, just took the 'tour' there, this looks great and closer than anything else I've seen to what I was looking for, thanks!

A Q before I join: not clear on the uploading your books and lending aspect. How are they handling that, I mean are they having people upload DRM'd copies of books and then enabling you to 'loan' them? Also, I assume that if one is in the habit of DeDRM'ing the books in your Calibre collection, these are NOT something you'd want to upload and use for lending on their site--this to me would seem like a point where it could go over the line in the sense you're now 'distributing' the DeDRM'd book and you're officially in the piracy business.


Never mind on that, found an FAQ on their site. No uploads/downloads of book content, the reference to lending is only about TRACKING books you have loaned to others. One other thing, I note that we have no functioning Calibre plugin for LT interaction; apparently Kovid posted that the site blocks metadata downloads. So that's a bummer, and 1 point in favor of GR which we do have a nice plugin for.

Now on Goodreads, yes I've continued to dig around on that site and it has some really nice features and nearly everything I said I'm looking for. But.....owned by Amazon, and only Kindle books purchased through Amazon seem to get the full integration in the sense of book notes, ratings, etc. I like Goodreads, just don't know if I want to invest all my eggs in that Amazon-controlled basket for things like tracking books read, ratings, etc. Because I have a LOT of non-Amazon books.....

[maddz]

Originally Posted by maximus83

Never mind on that, found an FAQ on their site. No uploads/downloads of book content, the reference to lending is only about TRACKING books you have loaned to others. One other thing, I note that we have no functioning Calibre plugin for LT interaction; apparently Kovid posted that the site blocks metadata downloads. So that's a bummer, and 1 point in favor of GR which we do have a nice plugin for.

Now on Goodreads, yes I've continued to dig around on that site and it has some really nice features and nearly everything I said I'm looking for. But.....owned by Amazon, and only Kindle books purchased through Amazon seem to get the full integration in the sense of book notes, ratings, etc. I like Goodreads, just don't know if I want to invest all my eggs in that Amazon-controlled basket for things like tracking books read, ratings, etc. Because I have a LOT of non-Amazon books.....

There is something called TinyCat over on LT which is a inventory & loan tracking system specifically designed for small libraries, but yes, LT is primarily for cataloging your books and doesn't allow uploads. However, you may to take a look at an app called Litsy (they were purchased by LT last year) which is much more discussion based. I took a look, but the app was too cutesy for my tastes and again, was more focused on social media reading discussions.

Re the Calibre integration, LT uses a lot of Amazon metadata so that's probably why they can't allow third party access to the LT metadata. It's a pain as I would love to have that integration, but if you're canny, you can set things up in Calibre and LT to it's easy to transfer metadata and cross-reference between the two. Incidentally, if you have a lot of books, you may want to look into how importing your metadata is handled by the different sites if you already have your library catalogued. I've never used it; I added (and am still adding) my library using manual searches, mostly because I have a fair number of obscure titles.

I don't know of anywhere that allows collaborative notes and discussions; you may find something in the education or academic market. I suspect there are issues with how ebooks are licensed that may kill this for general use.