Goodreads could be a good buy for Amazon

I had been meaning for a while to follow up my previous comments on http://www.goodreads.com/. In conversations at home, I had speculated why it wasn't better connected with my existing Ebook purchases. I didn't want to have to search for the book I was reading, I wanted Good Reads to auto-update whenever I bought a new book for my kindle or from the iBooks store.

So from a user point of view, I was more than a little surprised by some of the backlash to the announcement Amazon had purchased the site. In my mind, this could be a really great collaboration.

I have a number of issues with the Good Reads site. For one, the search functionality is poor. It is very unforgiving for spelling errors: we don't always remember how to spell an author's name, or the exact wording of a title. Amazon, in contrast, has incredible search. Regardless of whether you like or dislike Amazon as a service, if they were able to incorporate this into Good Reads then that is a great result for users.

I also really hope, as above, Amazon incorporate a link up with Good Reads on Kindle. I don't want to have to manually type in what recent ebooks I have purchased (and again be irritated when they don't show up in search, because I have forgotten the exact wording of the title).

There will also be great benefits for Amazon too. They tried, and (in my opinion) failed, to make a community work on Kindle, by showing what phrases people have highlighted or statistics for people who had read the same book. I'm not really interested in that. What I do want to see is what Good Reads has done a great job of capturing: what I've blogged about before as "friend-to-friend" peer recommendation. Even more powerful than the peer-to-peer word of mouth we have seen with TripAdvisor and other mainstream review services, this shows us what people who we have a genuine connection with are recommending. Amazon's reviews might offer some sense of what others make of a book, but think what power there would be in seeing reviews written by those you trust, whose opinion matters to you. That's where the power of this new relationship could lie.

Kindle for Web

Learn about Kindle for Web here, Amazon's new tool to encourage bloggers and publishers to link back to their store by embedding a chapter or chunk of book content.

This is pretty cool. I can't recollect whether you could already do something similar with Google Book Search (some small dull memory on this makes me think that you could?) but nevertheless Amazon's Kindle portfolio is growing rapidly and there is a lot of content I'd be quite happy to feature a short section of on my own website.

So without further ado, having read all about this I headed over to the Kindle store to try it out. Could I locate a book with the 'read it for free' button? Could I 'eckers like. I tried my most recent purchases, my favourite purchases, then headed for the most popular purchases on the Kindle store. None of them. Not one. Incidentally some of the books in the top of that Kindle chart? Bizarre...

So I'm left wondering, is this launched yet? Is it for US customers only? Am I missing something? Sigh.

Book rentals: where are we heading?

Catching up on a few weeks' worth of reading this evening. Obviously, working in publishing the business models for selling book content is a fascinating and important topic for me. Particularly academic publishing. So this article from TechCrunch was an interesting one. The growth of book rentals (725% growth for one retailer mentioned in that article) is really interesting. Particularly how much growth there is in the textbook market for this model.

In a way, it shouldn't be surprising that the rental model works for students, since in a way it mirrors the the way students generally engage with their learning. They will use a particular course material for a short period of time: during a particular course or period of their learning. Once they've gained what they need from that resource, they typically don't return to it, except perhaps for revision.

But is that the way we'd actually want our students to engage with scholarly content? Unlike with a fiction title (or actually generally any read-for-pleasure title) I think textbooks are things you dip in and out of over and over again. I guess that depends how many titles, and how relevant. But I know that I still have books I had in college that I turn back to, and the same for several business titles and professional development titles, not to mention light psychology titles!

The traditional models for accessing content over and over again like this were previously: : owning a copy of a book and knowing it's there on your shelf; or having access to a library copy which you can return to over and over again when required.

There are downsides to both options which the book rentals service would suggest it gets around. For the purchase option, the book rental claims it'll save you money. For the library option, there's the risk that 10 other college kids have gone in to find the same book at the same time.

You have to remember at this point in time I'm still talking about TRADITIONAL print publishing.

So how does the rental model hold up in a digital world? When I first started reading the TechCrunch article I immediately assumed that it was digital rentals. I mean, surely in the world of iTunes that is where our rental experiences now lie? I'm amazed that a printed rental model is proving so successful and am happy to admit I have some scepticism, based on the dip-in-briefly-but-often model I set out above.

So in digital? Does Rental overshadow ownership? Digital is immediately more attractive: for one thing providers (e.g. Vitalsource) provide tools so you can annotate and add notes in a way you could never do with a loaned print copy. The model (a la iTunes) is also more familiar here, and much more accessible/immediate compared with the print rentals. But is it better than ownership?

I think I need some more time to think about this one.