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BookArmy: Social Networking for Avid Readers

by Terrence O'Brien on April 26, 2009 at 11:24 AM

BookArmy: Social Networking for Book Lovers

In order for e-books to really take off it's going to take more than just the Kindle. To reach a breaking point, it's going to take social networking (and probably file sharing) for people to accept reading literature in electronic form. While we've seen a few services aimed at connecting book lovers, such as Shelfari and Goodreads, we haven't yet seen a book site that has so fully embraced a Last.FM-style of recommendation, sharing, and list-making as has the new London-based start-up BookArmy.

BookArmy starts simply enough by asking you to list, rate, and review books you've read, and then makes suggestions based on the preferences of other people who have read the same or similar books. Its tag line, "never read a bad book again," does strike us as a little presumptuous (especially considering that we entered a list of nothing but politically-themed, non-fiction books and it keeps insisting we'll really love the 'Da Vinci Code'). But, as more people sign up and rate books, the quality of the recommendations will only improve, we're sure.

Will BookArmy or GoodReads become the next media-sharing, social-networking service du jour? Only time will tell, but it rests squarely on two things: people's acceptance of reading books in digital format, and the availability of platform-agnostic content (an e-book equivalent of the DRM-free MP3). That said, with mega-publisher HarperCollins taking stake in BookArmy, the future of e-books is looking slightly brighter. [From: BoingBoing]

Tags: book, bookarmy, e-book, kindle, social networking, SocialNetworking, top

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