The big news in the book social networking world this week was Shelfari’s announcement that it has created a branded application for Facebook.
Facebook is the don of social networking sites and for Shelfari to implant their application in their playing field is a huge step in gaining market share.
The recent Publisher’s Weekly’s article on book social networking sites placed
Shelfari a distant third in the marketplace behind Goodreads.com and way behind Librarything who were first in.
This deal will close the gap considerably. Since the press release Shelfari has already seen record traffic and a record amount of new registrations.
And while Shelfari was getting kudos from Mashup as one of the 10 most beautiful websites I noticed one of the books that Librarything is featuring in that book pile image on the left side of their homepage is Lusty Lady. The book is a sort of photo-bio of the girls that work at the legendary Seattle peep-show. You know the place you go where it costs a quarter to get the screen to rise in your little booth for 15 seconds. I didn’t check to see if there was a Lusty Lady group as well.
I am wondering if LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding might be scratching his head since one of the main components of LibraryThing’s deal with AbeBooks was that they get “access to AbeBooks’s resources, expertise and marketing to enrich its site.”
We have a long way to go before the dust settles in this new arena. The publishers for the most part are still watching from the sidelines, the revenue streams for the websites have yet to be fully maximized; will it be advertising? book sales? etc. and what role will the authors play in all this?
There is also a large portion of the book loving world that has yet to jump on the social book network bandwagon. As Michael Allen at the Grumpy Old Bookman puts it “People of my generation just don’t find it so instinctive, and I for one tend to find it more trouble than it’s worth.” How will they be coaxed and to what service will they pledge allegiance to?
There are also tremendous possibilities in the non-new book world that have yet to be explored.
Hmm.. last month a cash infusion and a board member from Amazon and this month a deal with Facebook. My money is on them!