reader2 web book thing, plus coding thoughts

http://reader2.com/

• Social list of books - share your reading experience with other people.
• Recommendation system - find new books to read in the categories of your interest.
• Folksonomy - everybody can use his/her own keywords to categorize books.
• Faceted classification - predefined types of keywords for authors, reading statuses.
• Friend finder - easy discover people with similar reading tastes.
• Virtual community - discuss books and authors with other readers.
• Exportable and trackable - via RSS feeds and JavaScript snippets.

Am I permitted to add...

• does what normal humans actually expect their public library websites to do

Now, that being said, don't expect miracles,  The site only reports "34499 total books", and the revenue model and plan (or as rather gleefully described on the site "global world takeover project") appears to be mainly around driving traffic to Amazon.com  However, it does also link to Wikipedia Book Sources, which should land users at your library (you've set your library up in Book Sources, right?)

I like the status display of books people are current reading.

I also found the creator's reference to Rent A Coder in the site's blog interesting.
See, you don't have to be a coder.  Just have ideas, and rent the rest.

As I've said before, my recommendation is for libraries to get together, build a common front-end layer, then build your local community while transparently using Amazon's data.  (By transparently I mean: user enters review on your site, it also gets copied to Amazon; conversely, if a user in your area puts a review directly on Amazon, it should show up on your site.)  The reason to do this is Amazon has the network advantage - they have way more info than you will probably be able to generate in your relatively smaller local library community.  You should be able to easily switch modes: "what has everyone on Amazon tagged this book" vs "what tags have local users put on this book".

Comments

[Dima]

Thanks for the comment, I will add your idea about Amazon/local data to my ToDo list. If you (will) have other ideas, don't hesitate to tell me :)

P.S. Did you see MyFilmz ? I'm trying to build a better user interface there, and then copy it to Reader2 and MyProgs

[Dima]

P.S. If you have other ideas for a revenue model, I'll be glad to hear that too. I made it mainly because I missed a service like that personally, I don't want to make it pay-per-use thing, IMHO it should be open to anybody - that leaves me with only one option to compensate hosting expenses... (as I see it, maybe you have other ideas)

[Petrona]

I really like your suggestion about the Amazon tagging, and have linked to it from my own blog (url shoud be above this comment...)
I hope the idea gets picked up.