In this day and age of social media infiltrating every area of our lives, for good or bad, there is one area that has resisted this trend (at least up until now) – books. They are perhaps the last refuge from social media, and many people go to find shelter from media friending and tweeting in their comforting pages and worn binding. Unfortunately, this once solitary refuge is looking to join the social realm as companies like Copia and BookGlutton look to jump on board.
We found this news in Gigaom.com’s article, “Just How Social Will the E-book Be?” Copia offers a social e-reader platform that allows to readers to create their own page within the Copia community, connect to Goodreads online book community, and exchange recommendations. BookGlutton takes social inside the book itself with a browser-based book platform that allows for in-book commenting and tagging that can be shared, and even allows for in-book chats.
Interesting approach, but will this just be like comments at the end of a news article, or will it affect indexing? And if so, how? This will be interesting to watch.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
