06/03/07
Social Bookworking: the Karoo Test
It’s possibly heating up a little bit now. Just as AbeBooks.com announces that they are finally rolling in LibraryThing recommendations (which has to be a good thing), I thought I’d link to a few of the other sites doing similar things to Librarything.
I’ve always been more loyal to LibraryThing than any of the other book cataloguing sites such as Shelfari, BookTribes (and the others I mentioned a year ago).
Why? I don’t know. There was something about the potential of LibraryThing - that it was kind of homespun, badly designed, had an authentic, passionate and DIY voice that was much less ‘polished’ (read: invested in) than the others. It got very exciting when the site was growing about this time last year - as the thing that makes these sites a success is the sheer number of books catalogued on them
The potential for me was the ability to do what AbeBooks.com is now doing - to tie it in to a recommendation system on a pre-existing ecommerce platform. And for my part, I wanted in on it so that it’s data could be used as part of the ultimate publishing / booksale web site that I have in my head.
But, it still looks really geeky, has some pretty obscure icons and buttons and lots of library-esque codes and numberings that Perec would be proud of. Come on LT, invest in some good design and usability! The social aspects of the site - which Tim (the owner) has always played down almost as an embarassed feature of “web 2.0″ sites - are now common enough currency online to not be a gimmick - and I think this is the nettle LT should now grasp.
I digress. The question is whether the book cataloguing / social netwoek ‘market’ can support so many different sites, which (like any social network / catalog / recommendation system) depend on volume to become more accurate / relevant . In the same way that music has Last.FM, and Pandora to recommend music to us, books are now served by a number of sites - but it may be a matter of time before they join forces. It would be bad if the market became swamped, fragmented, and drowned itself in choice.
One site I hadn’t seen before is aNobii (which ticks all the web 2.0 design boxes, but is maybe a little mulit-lingual to be friendly). But to check that LibraryThing still cuts the mustard, I’m going to run a quick test against Karoo - my favourite book - and see what each comes up with.
Karoo on:
Librarything (which, tellingly, comes up ranked 7 on a google search for Karoo Steve Tesich)
Anobii
Shelfari
Reader2
(hmm!)
Booktribes
What does this tell us? LibraryThing has the scale and data to contribute to an AbeBooks search in a meaningful way. When the bookhints (as Abe are calling the LT data) is added to a Karoo search we do get some data, but it’s (again) pretty horribly presented, and doesn’t seem like so much of a big deal - more of a cheap Amazon “Other people bought…” feature with fraggier jackets.
Anyway, my guess is that these sites will continue to grow in popularity (especially with coverage such as in the NYT at the weekend) but that these sites, including LibraryThing, have got a long way to go before delivering on their potential, andproviding a one-stop recommendation / cataloguing site that really drives sales. I’ve never really got Abe, so knowing if they are actually the right partner to leverage the LT data is a tough call.
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL