

Amazon rolls out a social network for Kindle - jsavimbi
https://kindle.amazon.com/

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travisp
The biggest problem with this is that my wife and I share our Amazon account.
Although we have our own Kindles, we use the same Amazon account because we're
not going to buy two copies of every book that we both want to read. If we had
to do this, we would probably buy the paper version. So, my "stats",
highlights, and my account information include everything she has done with
her Kindle.

Until Amazon lets us have separate accounts (or somehow separate our reading),
this will be relatively useless for us. We can't even separately rate books,
or mark books as "hope to read", "reading", etc. and we're not going to buy
double copies just for that purpose. I suspect this is the same for many
others.

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r4vik
why don't you just strip the DRM on the books you buy? It won't help with the
social network stuff because Kindle doesn't "see" the stripped versions of the
book, but it would allow you to have two accounts for the purposes of 'hope to
read', 'reading', etc

~~~
travisp
These comments are specifically about the "social network stuff" and my point
is that Amazon's "social network" is useless to me because my wife and I are
required to share the same Amazon account if we don't want to double purchase
Kindle books.

What benefit would stripping the DRM of the books we buy bring us? We can
currently read the books on both our Kindles (allows up to 5 devices), we just
can't separate our accounts. How would we get our DRM-stripped Kindle books to
show up on separate kindle.amazon.com accounts (putting aside the hassle of
not being able to just directly download them on our Kindles)?

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mjs
It's been out for a while, and although it's really promising, a large number
of obvious features are completely missing. For example there's no RSS feeds
of a user's activity and there's no "per-book" pages (it'd be nice if you
could point friends to a page that shows your review of the book, plus the
passages you've highlighted/noted). There's a list of books you own, but
there's no way to search the list. Also, the "Daily Review" feature is broken
(I get the same book every day).

I think it could be a really useful site if Amazon would invest in it a
little. But it seems as if they've given up on it, since nothing seems to have
change since the site was launched. (Also, I haven't seen any review mention
it, so perhaps people don't care.)

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atgm
Why does everything have to be social? Reading for me is a profoundly private
experience. I get away from the world, I get away from people, and I sit alone
and read. It's a way of relaxing and refreshing myself without worrying about
the kinds of things that Amazon is attempting to inject into the Kindle with
this.

~~~
lemming
I think the actual reading is a private experience, but finding what to read
next is often a social experience.

~~~
baha_man
Yes, I don't want anyone talking in the cinema while I'm watching a film, but
I may want to talk about it afterwards.

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jasiek
I'd rather they released their SDK publicly instead of this. It has been in
beta for a year now, I think.

~~~
Groxx
No kidding. And it seems to be a _very_ private beta. I'd _love_ to write
something for a Kindle, I'd run out and buy one in an instant if I could, but
they've been dragging their heels for a very long time. Heck, I wouldn't even
mind if the entire system changed every couple months, breaking API changes
and all - _something_ is better than nothing.

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tokenadult
I have yet to try out any book-reading software, but this looks like the
killer social app that will convince me to choose Kindle rather than Nook. If
the new Google book reader links tightly with Google+, as one would expect to
happen soon, then I will commit to the Google product.

(I still read books the old-fashioned way, and my house is decorated in the
Industrial Bookshelf style. One of the things I like best to do online is to
discuss books and the ideas found in them.)

P.S. Thanks for the reply about Goodreads. I was an early adopter of
Goodreads, starting an account at the suggestion of a friend in another state,
but I stopped using it right away, because of its somewhat tedious interface,
and no longer trust Goodreads at all since I saw Google results from searches
on my name that included spurious Goodreads pages that appeared to promote
books that I've never read. (I ego surf on the major search engines from time
to time precisely to see what spoofing is being done in my name. I reported
the Goodreads fake page problem to Google last year.) I do have friends who
still like Goodreads a lot, but I'm thinking a tighter integration with an
ebook reader has to be a beneficial feature for an online social network, and
vice versa.

~~~
jawher
There is also <http://www.goodreads.com/>, a feature packed (maybe too much)
and a generic (as in not tied to any reading app/device/mode) ... how shall I
put it? reading management solution with a social flavour to it.

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goblin89
I wonder why Amazon decided not to incorporate Kindle support into already
existing Shelfari [1], which seems to have much prettier UI and bigger user
base.

[1] <http://www.shelfari.com/>, Amazon's social network for readers

~~~
esrauch
Amazon seems to take a hands-off approach with almost all of their
acquisitions.

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f7u12
This has been out a while and I always thought it had a lot of potential, but
they haven't really pushed it.

One barrier to more use of the service myself is their URL strategy. I don't
know my own link and, in the past anyway, it wasn't easy to navigate to my
profile.

~~~
reaganing
Yeah, this has been around for months with no push from Amazon for some
reason. I'm not sure many Kindle owners are even aware that kindle.amazon.com
exists and that they can view their highlights and notes there.

Seeing what your friends are reading and highlighting would be interesting.

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JeremyBanks
What's the news? What's new? kindle.amazon.com has been around for months, why
is this posted now?

~~~
esrauch
It actually launched over a year ago, this probably ended up posted here
because Tom Anderson just discovered it and posted about it on Google+ in the
last couple of days.

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Apocryphon
I hoping for full integration with Goodreads, or we fall into the classic
problem of redundant social networks.

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chinafoodie
Hopefully this will encourage not just book learning, but knowledge sharing
and vigorous discourse!

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djhworld
I'd rather they "rolled out" cheaper ebooks tbh (or at least encouraged
publishers to do so)

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frankwiles
If they had bought Lendle or even just implemented the idea, it might actually
be useful.

