There are quite a few book sites providing good discoverability combined with community, combined with curated selections, etc. etc.
You've added a nice design, but the categorization of the books is weak as is the selection itself. I looked at History, which seems to be comprised of 'historical fiction' and I looked for "Tony Judt" who was a significant recently published historian but is not represented.
I almost feel like this doesn't matter because none really stand out. Grabbing mind share as "the rotten tomatoes for books" I feel like is ripe for the taking
You'll note that some of these are dead or dying, which leads me to the small point that I'd make: creating a book site is pretty easy: the audience likes print-media and there are rafts of digitized content available, but getting a site to sustain is hard.
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There are quite a few book sites providing good discoverability combined with community, combined with curated selections, etc. etc.
You've added a nice design, but the categorization of the books is weak as is the selection itself. I looked at History, which seems to be comprised of 'historical fiction' and I looked for "Tony Judt" who was a significant recently published historian but is not represented.
I almost feel like this doesn't matter because none really stand out. Grabbing mind share as "the rotten tomatoes for books" I feel like is ripe for the taking
Can you list them? The one I'm familiar with is Goodreads, but if there are others, I'm interested.
Aside from Goodreads, my list includes:
http://www.librarything.com/ http://www.shelfari.com/ http://49thshelf.com/ http://openbooktoronto.com/ http://www.filedbyauthor.com http://www.thecopia.com/home/index.html http://www.booksprouts.com/ http://www.bookglutton.com/ http://weread.com
You'll note that some of these are dead or dying, which leads me to the small point that I'd make: creating a book site is pretty easy: the audience likes print-media and there are rafts of digitized content available, but getting a site to sustain is hard.
http://www.librarything.com is another that's quite popular.