SixApart Vox - a blog with a book library

SixApart, of TypePad, MoveableType and LiveJournal blog platforms, launched Project Comet with a demo a while back.  Since then you've been able to register to be invited to participate in what is now called Vox

http://www.sixapart.com/vox/

One main concept in Vox is assets, which can be managed as part of your library.  There are four types of external assets:

• Photos
• Books
• Audio
• Video

Not surprisingly, I will focus on the Books functionality.

Here's the high-level summary: a VERY basic interface, that connects to Amazon.com only.

The interface is strongly image thumbnail centric.  It considers books, audio, etc. to be quite separate, one from the other.

If you want to dive in right away, my site is

http://rakerman.vox.com/

Continuing with the detailed review...

There are also two types of internal assets: Posts and Comments.

The Vox setup (once you're invited to the beta) is fairly painless, but by default it assumes you're in the US.

The interface is fairly streamlined, with lots of ads.  One of the first places you may encounter books is on the Explore screen

http://www.vox.com/explore/books/

If you click on a book, e.g. Five Fists of Science, it takes you to the page for the owner of that book.
I don't know what it does if multiple people own the same book.

Having discovered this functionality, you may want to add your own books.

You can do this while posting, but there is also an Organize interface.

There is one and only one option for adding books: Amazon (.com)

As far as Vox is concerned, a book is a title, an author, and a cover image.
That's as much info as you get when you choose a book, and that's as much metadata as you can access or manipulate about the book - no ISBN, no ASIN, no other catalogue info.

The selection screen doesn't even give you that much - just a list of a few characters in the title and the cover image, which you can expand to see more of the title.

Once you have items in your book library, there is a very basic navigation interface, again cover-image based.  You have the option to View or Edit the book, and when you hover over it, you see a larger cover image and sharing information.

Selecting View Item takes you to the library page that everyone will see when they click on your instance of the book.  There you can do a few basic things - mark as favorite, comment, or rate the book.  Also Flag as offensive (which is an interesting concept, for books).  But that's only if you're signed into Vox.  If you're not signed in, you can only view the information.  Also, there is a link to Amazon of course.

If you're thinking you can make some coin by having all the fancy library of books and music use your Amazon associate ID, you're out of luck - there is no way to enter it - it uses SixApart's ID.

(I submitted this as feedback, but the feedback submission failed.)

Edit options are basically around rights (who can view this) and description - tags, comments, ratings, details.

You can add tags, comma-separated, it forces them all to lowercase (despite the brief appearance of "Iraq" on this page, it soon turned it into "iraq").  Tag navigation is mostly around searching and tag cloud.  In your library, it doesn't show what tags are attached to which books in the main display.

Here is a search in my personal Organize interface on the tag "currently reading".  I have to say, tagging feels a bit glued-on, it's not well integrated into the navigation.  It doesn't display the current tag prominently - I really get the feeling the interface is photo-centric, and everything was squeezed into that paradigm.  I couldn't even figure out exactly how, after searching on "currently reading", I'm supposed to get back to viewing all of the books, regardless of tag. 

There is no way in either the organize or the main Vox blog interface, as far as I can tell, to say "show everything tagged with X".  You can just see books with X, then click over and see photos with X, etc.  Which loses one of the main cool discovery capabilities with tags.

Books are displayed as part of my main blog page,

http://rakerman.vox.com/

and when you click on the books section, you go to

http://rakerman.vox.com/library/books/

As with elsewhere in the app, tags are not well integrated.  Not only are they not displayed with each book, but if you're on the books page and you click on the tag cloud, it very unintuitively takes you to POST tags

http://rakerman.vox.com/library/posts/tags/currently+reading/

As mentioned before, the app has walls between each asset - I don't think there's anyway to say "show me everything of every type tagged X".  It really seems to have a strong bias for photos as an interface - thumbnails of everything as the way to navigate.

I do think it's an interesting idea to have books as first-class content citizens in a blogging app, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired, not least of which the fact that there is no flexibility to integrate with libraries or other cataloguing apps (e.g. LibraryThing), and that there is so little metadata (not even an ISBN, plus even titles are often not fully displayed) that doing mashups or extensions is going to be a challenge.

There is also no way I can see to get from my tagged books

http://rakerman.vox.com/library/books/tags/currently+reading/

to the logical social networking extensions - show me all of username's friends with (books with) this tag, show me all books in the system with this tag.  Or for that matter, even the essential function "who else has this book, and are they hot?"

UPDATE: Apparently you can explore all tags, asset silo by silo, using the, err, explore syntax, which you discover by hovering over tags.  Note to interface designers: MAKE THINGS EXPLICIT.  No fancy discover-on-hover.

http://www.vox.com/explore/books/tags/non-fiction/

Comments

[Steve Lawson]

Nice analysis. Looks like Tim Spalding of Library Thing has an account now: http://librarything.vox.com/ I agree that it would be great to have a Library Thing - Vox connection.

I also agree that it is hard to figure out the Vox interface at times. But they are trying to do some pretty interesting things, and it is still in "preview" mode, so I hope that constructive criticism like this will help make things more usable.