

The world's biggest book club - k-mcgrady
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/09/books-and-internet

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a_bonobo
I'm an avid goodreads-user, mostly to exchange book-recommendations and find
books to read via the recommendation-engine.

Some gripes with the page:

\- people are too nice, every single book seems to have a 4/5 rating - with
positive reviews to boot! I've read at least 5 shitty (not only shitty - but
badly written, terrible characters, amateur work) books that had a plethora of
positive reviews on goodreads. Weighted reviews, or weighting users' votes
based on how much they vote might help.

\- The recommendation-engine is quite conservative: I usually get books
recommended that are insanely similar to the ones I like, or even from the
same authors (or books that I've usually already read). I got around 160 books
rated now. I don't get any far-flung recommendations, like, for example, "you
seem to like freaky stuff (Cosmic Bandidos) so here's Ass Goblins of
Auschwitz."

\- and one issue Goodreads can't do anything about: Would be nice to have
Kindle-integration to track reading-progress, right now Kindles (afaik) only
have Facebook/Twitter-integration, which is useless to me.

Also interesting to see that the majority of users (I see) use their real
names for their accounts, and I don't think goodreads actually enforces this.
How did they do that?

~~~
farnsworth
The Kindle integration brings up an interesting issue, which is that Amazon
doesn't seem to really be investing in the Kindle SDK. Last I used it anyway,
it's not very powerful, doesn't give you any integration with books, access to
the web browser, etc. And that's if you do get access to the SDK, I know devs
who've had a hell of a time getting in, even with genuinely interesting ideas.

Of course there are privacy concerns, but it's the same problem that Android
and iOS and solved well enough. Maybe they're worried about poorly written
apps draining the battery? I think they're missing out on a huge opportunity.
But another explanation would be that the current Kindle SDK isn't planned to
last - maybe future eInk Kindles will run a watered-down version of Android?

~~~
a_bonobo
Another point to add to this is that as far as I know, the Kindle Browser
still hasn't made it past "experimental" state, and has been in development
since the Kindle 3 (I think), without anything being changed or added.

Switching to Android seems more likely than pouring money into home-grown
apps.

