A web site which should exist; Last.Fm for books.

Last.fm works so well because it's easy to automatically find out what people are listening to. The challenge with books is to get people to tell you manually what they are currently reading.

I picture a collection of things like bookmarklets where I can browse Amazon or isbn.nu for the book I'm currently reading and then tell an API on your site the ISBN number. There's also a system in the USA (I
forget exactly where) for building an inventory of books (among other things) by scanning the barcodes with a small cuecat reader or by using a mobile phone camera.

Once you have data like that there's a raft of possibilities around recommendations for book reading, social networking based on reading habits, reviews and gossip, tagging and so on. http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/ is a start but there's way more potential here.

Anyone want to try and build it with me?


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[ 17-Oct-05 3:00pm ] [ , , ]