One of the most appealing features of these sites is the opportunity to snoop on virtual bookshelves. In turn, you can then post recommendations and write your own review, allowing that literary gem that you unearthed to become a word of mouth success. So just as the muso can alight on some brilliant, obscure band through lastfm, now us bibliophiles can enjoy a similar smugness from tracking down an underrated novel. As its founder, Charles Denton said, he'd rather look to friends for advice than an algorithm. Yet unlike Amazon, which is guilty of overloading its users with irritatingly presumptuous recommendations, bookrabbit encourages you to make your own finds. While bookrabbit's design and versatility make it my favourite, it also has a canny commercial edge: once you've stumbled upon your gem of a book it takes just a few more clicks to purchase it. This follows in the footsteps of America's LibaryThing, which has just linked with Random House, and a host of competitors including goodreads, bibliophil, booksie, booktribes and shelfari. The latest on the scene is the UK-based site bookrabbit. And where music goes, books will follow, as a wave of new book-related social networking sites promise to do for readers what Lastfm did for inquisitive listeners. ![]() This follows the same principle as the radio site Lastfm, which is based on tracking down music similar to your existing tastes by finding people who like the same sounds as you.Īs we purportedly experience Facebook fatigue and Myspace exhaustion, web forecasters predict that the next phase of social networking will be all about specialist sites like these. When these projections of personality are done online, they are what Christine Rosen calls egocasting - "the thoroughly personalised and extremely narrow pursuit of one's personal taste".
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