Gamification, social reading, and crowdsourcing were the topics of the night. Here’s a recap of how the night played out.
BookNet Canada’s November 23 Code Meet Print session looks at the brave frontier of …reading! The session, called Reading Is Social, is timely as we move into the season that everyone in the book industry is pumped for—the holidays! Are people still going to buy that someone special a dead tree copy of that great non-fiction title, or are they thinking about how they can really show they care by getting involved in the latest greatest trends in e-reading? How are they going to decide what to pick up for their Secret Santa exchange? Where will they find out about new books?
Questions like these made us wonder: How is the book industry leveraging game mechanics, crowdsourcing, and social platforms to make reading even more attractive?
Many of us are avid readers. We’ve all gotten tips from friends on what the next most amazing, imaginative, exciting, fresh, brain-imploding new book is and we add it to our to-read list. Well, friends… that list is going to get a lot longer and a lot better with the book recommendation algorithm from Goodreads.
If you haven’t already visited, Canadian Bookshelf, I would highly recommend you take a little time to do so. The site itself looks great and there is a plethora of great (Canadian) content already there with more to come. I won’t go into all the features and functions of the site here as you can just go and try it out or read about it on their blog, but I will point out why we like this project in one word: collaboration.
We have been busy with CataList lately. Yes, we’ve been signing up publishers and booksellers on the system and helping them get started. We’ve had several online demos. But what people don’t realize is that we’re also continuing to work on CataList itself. We’re adding new features to it all the time in response to user feedback. It’s the little things that make a difference with a product like this, and we wanted to show you three of the ones that have been most useful so far.
Richard Nash needs no introduction but if he does you can do no better than to tune into the talk he gave at the 2010 BookNet Technology Forum. Nash has been re-imagining the business of publishing for some time and, in fact, left his post at Soft Skull to begin building that re-imagining.
Red Lemonade, his new project, is all about connecting readers and writers and has that social community goodness baked right in. There are no walled gardens here.
Does this on its own reinvent publishing?
BookNet Canada is a non-profit organization that develops technology, standards, and education to serve the Canadian book industry. Founded in 2002 to address systemic challenges in the industry, BookNet Canada supports publishing companies, booksellers, wholesalers, distributors, sales agents, industry associations, literary agents, media, and libraries across the country.
