For a while there was largely nothing, then there was Allconsuming which was wonderful, but slowly died, and went dark before being re-incarnated in the mold of a 43x tool. And I have this memory of there being a nifty little $14/mo tool, back in the days when I didn’t pay for websites, but I wasn’t able to find it.

Last Fall, I started sketching down notes towards building my own, and in the intervening year its become an interestingly crowded space. (who knew so many other people felt the pull) Even in the 6 weeks since I first started jotting down sites for this blog post, the space has evolved with LibraryThing coming out solidly on top as the most active: most actively developed, most actively used, and most actively engaged developer.

That said, in a cursory search (mostly of my del.icio.us links) I turned up 5 other very similar services

• Allconsuming: the Next Generation
• Bibliophil
• Books We Like – “activist e-commerce and collective intelligence”
• Listal – where “all” is defined as DVDs, Books, Music, and Games
• Reader2 – repurposing of the MyProgs codebase

Also the Bookshelf example app from 24L, and the intersting related services What Should I Read Next?, and Library Elf

None of them are quite there yet, and I want more, more, more!

LibraryThing

• So like I said, LT is rocking out in terms of development and growth. When I first found it, it lacked import, ratings, and feeds. Wow.

• Additionally the search is amazingly comprehensive, fast, and accurate. Search is where LibraryThing originally shined, and it blows every other service out of the water. LT was the only service to successfully come up with “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town” when I searched for “someone comes”. Which is good, because there is no way I’m typing in full titles. (just re-tested, and Allconsuming which wasn’t finding anything last time I checked, also came up with the correct results)

• Surprisingly zippy.

• One-click export. Sweet.

LibraryThings: The Downside

• No per-tag feeds, apparently on the todo list, but I need per feed tags.

• No feed of reviews, also on the todo list, but I’m simply not willing to create content without an RSS feed. (which is why I’ve stopped writing $0.02 reviews on Netflix)

• Feeds lack anything beyond basic data. No structured meta-data (authors, isbn/asin, cover art, etc), so very limited usefulness.

• One dimensional tags. (no tag combos)

• Ugly, and awkward. Totally in the eye of the beholder, but I find the interface consistently confusing and awkward to use. I only have a handful of books in my catalog, but already its feeling unmanageable. Not a designer, so I can’t do much more then complain.

• One comment/review per book, meaning you can’t use it to blog your ongoing experience with a book. One of my use cases for a book service is that I can use it to power a book blog.

• Uses frames!?!?? In this day and age? Meaning it can’t be the that “definitive URI for books” that I keep looking for.

Listal

• More then just books if you’re in to that thing. I’m not really, and find it kind of frustrating that I sometimes end up searching DVDs.

• Slick, clean, attractive.

• Allows browsing by author! (key missing feature for LibraryThing)

• Per tag feeds, multiple reviews/comments per book.

Listal: Cons

• Feels sluggish, aggravated by a click heavy interface.

• Limited import.

• Not run by a book nut, and in general the site is voiceless failing to expose either the developer, or the user community. Feels stagnant.

• Search failed the “Someone Comes” test.

Bookshelf

I thought I was going to like Bookshelf. I love the concept of the Ning “Pivot”, if not the implementation. Unfortunately Bookshelf is very slow, and buggy. I dived into the code (I can do that with Ning, whoohoo!!!), and unfortunately rather then the domain specific langauge for building social webapps I expected to find, I just found a messy of PHP code.

What I Still Want/Need/Dream About

I wrote down a list of things I wanted a while back, and LT is converging on it very quickly, and for that I’m inclined to overlook the interface.

Syndication

I need more feeds. Per tag feeds allow for intelligent interaction with the site. Beyond topical tags, functional tags (e.g. *to:read) allow me to syndicate the information out in useful ways

And richer feeds please. E.g. if you can’t syndicate the cover art give me the necessary metadata so I can pull it from AWS.

More data and Webservices

And note, I’m happy with my primary webservice being a feed, but I need richer way to interact with the data before I can make it work for me.

I’d like to be able to hook this up to my local library (auto-request books flagged *to:read), Upcoming, and Amazon.

Plus I should be able to power my involvement in What to Read Next/Books We Like/innovative new service from within LT (or at least with my LT data)

More Pivots

I’d like author, and ratings smooshed down into the tag namespace. So I can browse by author, and by rating. Additionally I’d like to be able to browse tag combos, author plus tag combos, and author plus rating combos.

Insta-Community

I love the idea of integrating a forum into the site. And really integrating it.

1. Allow people to start new threads from a book page
2. Tag those threads with the book
3. Display only properly tagged threads on the book page
4. Aggregate all threads in a more standard forum view.

(We’ve discussed doing something similar for Social Source Commons, though haven’t yet)

Book Scanning

Ala Monster’s Delicious

What would be involved I wonder if writing a simple app/Firefox plugin to scan barcodes using something like an iSight or a CueCat, and have it post the data to a URL?

Blue Sky: Peerflix for Books?

Like Bookcrossing for books you want to get back someday.

update: Also Stuffopolis, and Douban

3 years later its been revived (in 24 hours!), and is now being officially hosted as a Robot Coop app! This is great. Because there is sooo much more I’d like to see done with it! (Haven’t decided if this is good enough reason to stop hacking on my Rails book management app which is still just some quick sketches in a notebook)

That said, I’m a little ambivalent of the last of focus in the new app. Not sure if its snobbery, or segregationist tendencies, but I don’t want to share the website with non-book like media. But thats a minor quibble.

The Robots have always said that 43 Things was just the first of a long list of good ideas they wanted to roll out, and here we have their second app. Congrats guys.

With Netflix Friends you can see what your friends are watching and share your favorite movies with them.

Renting and in particular rating are once again performative acts. There is a real value there, and in services like Audioscrobbler, or All Consuming, or 43 Things, and even the undirected social network sites like Orkut or Friendster, and yet …

I mean, I already maintain a blog, do I really want to share what I’m listening to, what I’m reading, what I’m watching, what I’m working on, and who I know? I don’t know. I just know that even though I’m flirting with Netflix Friends, I am very aware of the virtual clinking of coins, as I barter a little more privacy for a little more leveraged access to the network.

(I also predict that Netflix will over the next 6 months see an increasing disconnect between what people rate high, and what they watch, the Masterpiece Theater vs. Jerry Springer syndrome, and an associated degradation in the quality of their data.)

When Nielsen used log-books to gather information on the viewing habits of their sample families, the results were heavily skewed to Masterpiece Theater and Sesame Street. Replacing the journals with set-top boxes that reported what the set was actually tuned to showed what the average American family was really watching: naked midget wrestling, America’s Funniest Botched Cosmetic Surgeries and Jerry Springer presents: “My daughter dresses like a slut!”

update: tom is already experiencing the “social” side of it all.

By the way, it looks a little different then DJ’s because SOAP::Lite’s autodispatch+ feature breaks Template Toolkit (and is kind of icky anyway)

…the question is all the more pressing in light of the Two Towers, which was basically a three hour long George Lucas smack down.

It is part of a genre of Two Towers bait and switch blog entries (hixie’s Birthday Movie being the other example) that I feel speak to a culture wide lowered expectation that Jackson is upsetting.

Will now stop blogging obsessively, while waiting for client to call. Wireless router is proving dangerous.

So I looked at Allconsuming a few times, didn’t sign in, didn’t really get it.

Went back this morning, futzed with it, was confused by the interface for a little while, and then my head exploded. I’m in love. This is the site I was looking for when I wrote the entry on book metadata, and its author was kind enough to respond to my entry and too self-effacing to point out the obvious to me.

Its an amazing site, a beautiful web app (in a functional way), capitalizes on the new social, semantic distributed blogo network better then anything I’ve encountered, and is whip smart.

Favorite flourish

Next Step

Sorry to burrble so early in the morning, but I’m excited.

Related

Books, Conversations and Semantic Web

But I’ve got a problem. All of these systems require that a book have a uniquely identifying URI (its a sneaky back door application of the semantic web), and the ad-hoc standard that has arisen is Amazon. There are a number of compelling reasons to link to Amazon: decent information, community and proffessional reviews, and of the whole associates thing. And there are reasons not to link to Amazon, primarily I don’t want people buying their books from Amazon but from their local bookstores! Also you are: bombarded with ads for People’s magazine, Epson printers, and clean underwear, tracked and indexed, and have handed over the keys to controlling conversations about books to a single corporation who aspire to be just like Walmart, not the what I look for in a Muse.

Alternatives: In Search of a Definitive URI

Now books do have a unique identifier, their ISBN, so at some level we can be linking them across various URI schemes, and while not ideal it might be a place to start. So what else can we use?

Booksense is a possibility. Booksense is a great idea, its a coalition of independent bookstores that share reccomendations, book certificates, and a website. Unfortunately their website sucks. If I want to link to Dubious Hills by Pamela Dean, a book which is out of print, and no one in my zip code happens to be carrying it, I can’t. Booksense only display information about books in your area in a misbegotten idea to drive people locally. I’ve tried several times to talk to them about this failure of their website, that you don’t get anywhere by slamming shut the door in peoples face, but they are un-interested in listening. That and they expose the implementation of the site in their URLs (booksense.com/product/info.jsp?isbn=$ISBN) which does not reccomend the the longevity of their URIs.

The Library of Congress has potential with a catchy, short URL, besides being logical. But is even worse. Its slow, confusing, and does not, as far as I can tell, I expose any sort of permanent URL.

There have been interesting expirements with setting up book sites based on trackbacks, like the Book Review repository, but I don’t believe these have the potential to be the definitive URIs, more likely they will be consumers of such.

So I’m kind of out of ideas? Anybody else have a reccomendation?

In the short term it would be nice if people writing book crawlers supported Booksense as well, but I understand why they wouldn’t as Booksense is really shooting themselves in the foot. (I mentioned this idea to Bookwatch at one point, not sure what became of it)

I’ve asked Aidan to look into how much it costs to get a digital copy of books in print, but I imagine its prohibitively expensive, and not something that is feasible for a personal hobby project.

Closing Thoughts

The one positive idea I’ve thought about is, if we can come up with something good, then it would be very simple to get great penetration by adding support for it as a macro in Moveable Type, e.g. ISBN:$ISBN and auto-construct the URL.

And a final qualifier, if you see me linking to Amazon in the future, know that it is merely a recognition of their dominant position in the market place as the only decent provider of book meta-data, and not a reccomendation to buy from them.

update: isbn.nu could be a good book namespace, and allcosuming does support booksense, and more. see comments for details.