After kellan pointed out that somebody else has tried to do track backs with books (aka: booktracks) I've spent a bunch of time trying to think through how this kind of information architecture might work. Much of my thinking around booktracks is related to publishers- for publishers, it's useful to track reviews and have ways of seeing who is talking about books and where.
The problem with this model is that most people don't think about books in terms of publishers. When we look for books for the most part we look by subject mater and authors. Since publishers often produce a wide variety of material the potential of liking other books from the same publisher isn't as high as it would be for an author.
The problem is that in terms of tracking conversations about books, publishers are probably more interested than anybody else. Of course, authors are going to be interested in what people say about their books, and people who want to read books want to know what people are talking about, but publishers want to be able to watch all of their books and have an easy way of tracking down that information. Amazon has been a central place where people do this, but it drives traffic away from publishers and other book sellers and also doesn't necessarily have the best format for discussions about books. Given Amazon's dominance in the world of book selling, it's easy to understand why it became the place for people to find reviews.
While generally, I take the position that the centralization of information is typically a good thing as it means that people who want to use information know where to go for it, the problem with things like reviews and book discussions is that the aren't all going to take place in one spot. Furthermore, the software that Amazon is using isn't really conducive for sharing information about books or the reviews that are on its site, and it's a for profit company who could probably care less about sharing information from books. Of course, people have, are and will keep figuring out ways to mine Amazon for data, but relying on them isn't exactly great for getting rich data to flow,
So the question is how do you both centralize book review and conversation data without relying on a single site?
One possibility is to use the publisher as the repository. This makes sense in that the publisher ought to have the best data on the book and be able to notify when new editions come out etc. The problem is that not all publishers are online, they aren't an intuitive place to look for reviews, and they may not be happy if negative things are said about books.
My hunch is that FOAF (friend of a friend) is something to look at. Imagining for a moment that we have some kind of Open Book Data Exchange Format, this would all anybody taking about books to publish something in this format and then any number of applications could sniff around and use this data in unique ways. Because books already have a handy unique identifier (ISBN numbers), it would be easy to aggregate data and do fun manipulations with it. Of course, the problem is in supporting it and getting people who write reviews to actually start using it, but given that bloggers seem to love various forms of syndication, it makes sense to me that it could be adopted by a community.
Post new comment