Reading books is usually a solitary experience, but it triggers social activity as well, as the ongoing success of real-life book clubs shows. BookSprouts is a fairly new online community dedicated to book readers who love discussing books over a nice cup of virtual coffee. The social network is designed to make it easy to start an online book club, discuss books with other individuals, organize meetings and write up reviews.
First of all: the website looks and feels great. Signing up was quick and easy, and the lay-out of the website as well as the copy all make it very clear what to do after you’ve registered. There’s a powerful search behind the community layer so it’s very easy to add books you’ve read, or books you haven’t read yet but would like to. Creating and joining a book club on BookSprouts is done in a heartbeat, and you can look for book clubs by book (surprise!), subject, author, or geographic location. Based on the search results, the social network currently counts about 275 virtual book clubs, but some of them are invite-only.
BookSprouts faces the same hurdle most online community websites do when they launch: the inevitable ‘chicken and egg’ problem. I added a couple of books I read to my virtual bookshelf, but none were being discussed in any book clubs, nor were there any reviews. That means there’s not much social about this particular network for me so far. I could start my own book club of course and recruit members from the site or my own friends, and start writing reviews like crazy, but we all know only a small percentage of users actually gets around to being an active creator on these types of services, so only time will tell if BookSprouts can turn enough visitors into online book club ‘leaders’.
I also don’t see the business model behind BookSprouts. You have to dig very hard to find ads on the site and users don’t get charged for anything. What I see are affiliate links for buying books you’ve added to your profile on Amazon or AbeBooks (which recently became part of the Amazon family), but that seems rather pointless as I’m likely to already own books I’m declaring myself a fan of.
BookSprouts will find itself competing with Shelfari (recently acquired by Amazon) and the AbeBooks-backed LibraryThing, both of which are social networks centered around books.
(Found via MoMB)
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Site design is pretty good.
I can see “Read n Swap books” option will be good value added service!
regards,
Chandra
http://www.myjil.com
Social money engine
Sorry TC, sorry Robin. I really would like to comment of this usefull post. However, I could not. The only reason that is formulated to be an obstacle is what happened to my far away people in Gaza strip. In just 2 hours 155 Palestinains die in Israeli air strikes. I know TC is a place for Web 2.0 and all related technology, but I could not have two seperated personalities and stand away from that by leashing my mind, though and belief.
For the mass visit BBC, CNN, Aljazeera or Twitter and check out what happened.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7800985.stm
http://english.aljazeera.net/n.....09662.html
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=gaza+strike
I was always asking my self a question, is why those Palestinian Geeks and Tech people are not having their startups out to the community, and only today I knew the answer.
Sorry TC, sorry Robin. I really would like to comment of this usefull post. However, I could not. The only reason that is formulated to be an obstacle is what happened to my far away people in Gaza strip. In just 2 hours 155 Palestinains die in Israeli air strikes. I know TC is a place for Web 2.0 and all related technology, but I could not have two seperated personalities and stand away from that by leashing my mind, though and belief.
I guess you had no problem reading such posts in the past 8 years while the Hamas was shooting missiles at Israeli cities on a daily basis.
Ahmad, wake up and smell the coffee. People are dying because a terrorist organization is controlling Gaza. You want to stop the killing - fight Hamas.
Tired of lame Palestinian propoganda
AMEN!! agree 100%
Hi, thanks for your blog:)
Looks interesting, and also in the competition is http://www.librarything.com
I will check it out. I think it could work. Consider Livejournal for example. There are communities on LJ for specific book series and reviews. So I can see those individuals using Booksprouts if they are aware of it.
just another social networking site and one more feather in social networking blogs
regards
artha
http://tinyurl.com/7uvuyt
Looks a lot like a competitor to http://www.bookhopper.com but without the free swapping service. Bookhopper still edges it.
Another social networking site? I rarely sign up for new things until they’ve gained traction among the twitterati, but this I’ve got to try. Not because I read a lot, but because I don’t read enough and I wish I read more.
Thanks for sharing Robin!
@KyNamDoan
Well, I actually appericiate http://www.douban.com in China.
It uses books, films, music as its content seeds.
Perhaps one potential business model would be to create an affiliate network relationship with small local independent bookstores.
Or, has one of these similar book club web sites already done that? Just seems like that model would be a win-win scenario.
Little known fact: http://www.Shelfari.com built big parts of the site on http://www.MindTouch.com, using it as a specialized application server. Because of MindTouch Deki’s web oriented architecture (WOA) many use MindTouch as a specialized app server for developing collaborative and social applications.
Just gave it a spin. For something that’s in beta, it isn’t bad. I’m really liking the look of the site, and the book search is really simple and clean. I like the look of the review form..
But there’s no widget we can add to our sites/blogs. Nor do I see a way to cluster the books into different categories. I’ll still use Shelfari to keep track of the books I’ve read.
But like I said, it’s not bad for something that’s in beta. I will definitely give it another look once it comes out of beta.
Awesome. It’s been at least two weeks since I’ve been accosted by someone trying to get me to join a new book reading social network. :^|
nifty interface, but doesn’t make me want to move away from http://www.goodreads.com. goodreads’ interface is still a work in progress, but it is centered around the books more than around the book club idea, which seems to naturally nurture the group/club idea.
I had been using goodreads for awhile too. But then I moved my collection over to http://www.itrackmine.com because it offers the same kind of collection managment and sharing but its not limited to books. I keep track of my music, games and movies now. So far its been a great experiance.
Thank you, Goodreads always seems to be forgotten or ignored when someone blogs about a site like this.
I have to say AMZN’s presence makes shelfari the pace I go.
I think these sites that index paper books and encourage discussions are great. I wanted to point out http://www.BookGlutton.com allows social networking inside books - which makes it easier to see discussions (just open the book). Contemporary content is on the way, btw…
Interesting! Many interesting startups are coming out on this space. I found another startup named Cruxle (http://www.cruxle.com) that recommends not just books, but also Music, Movies, TV Shows and Videos. The interesting part is they recommend across categories, for example, you can find your favorite book by mentioning your favorite Music. It also helps us to find like-minded people, mostly from MySpace so as to network with them . Pretty interesting company, you should check it out.
I use Goodreads as well. They are not mentioned in this article but according to google trends and ComScore they have a lot more traffic than Librarything and Shelfari.
As the founder of Goodreads, I just wanted to welcome Bookspouts to the space. The book social network space is pretty established however, so I wish them all the luck in finding their place.
Goodreads also has bookclubs - over 9,000 of them. We have authors like Paulo Coelho and Neil Gaiman on the site. A reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer even recently wrote about one of our bookclubs.
Why is that good to put every next web 2.0 on the internet? Isn’t it shame? Why would book readers gather together online when they like reading even for the reason of smelling the paper? I don’t get it. Tell me if you do at my website: http://barnabasnagy.net
Why isn’t this a facebook app? Anyone? I have to port my social graph again? FAIL.
Hi TC,
First of all, wow! thanks for writing up our little site!! We are three guys originally from Vancouver, Canada that started with this idea over 2 years ago. Like many startups, we each hold down “real” jobs while we work on Booksprouts during our off-hours. Getting reviewed on TC is definitely a redemption of sorts for the extra hours put in.
From the very beginning, we’ve worked hard on the design and usability of the site. Nevertheless, there are still a thousand and one things that we want to add to or improve on.
As far as a business model, we are looking at several options right now. It’s great to make money but we really made this site so that people will like us
Keep up the great work and happy new year!
Dave
I think I will start a social network for people to discuss what they do with books other than reading them.
I know of a Grisham novel that is just the right thickness to prop up the corner of my broken TV stand.
There’s also Readernaut, which I think beats out both of these in terms of design. It’s still in beta, but it’s really great: readernaut.com
screenshots here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/w.....17/detail/
write-ups here:
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/.....ead_or_Not
and
http://brianford.newsvine.com/.....ta-invites
Hey what a coincidence! I came across this site a few months ago when I was searching for a review on book. I didn’t sign up but was impressed with the usability and design. I live in a small town so having an online book club is a great idea. Now, I just have to find a book worth discussing.