Personal Book Catalogues - Time for a 'Course Books' Service?
Sometime ago, before I got into blogging, I tussled with the idea of what Amazon Academic might look like. The leverage would come from students and academics listing courses required on a particular course in a 'course wishlist', or some such (now I realise you'd just tag the books with a course code or course ID...).
There were several possible benefits - for potential students wanting to see what sorts of stuff they'd be letting themsleves in for if they took the course (they would of course be able to browse inside a book on Amazon, or via Google print); for academics, looking to see what the rest of the academic community was recommending their students to read; for the students - possibly - having a comprehensive booklist with single click purchase or library reservation etc etc.
At the time, I thought you could get quite a long way into this by repurposing Amazon wishlists, but now there are a few 'social book cataloguing' sites that would suit the bill admirably.
Reader2 has very pretty AJAX interface that pulls in book covers from your tagged and catalogued books, and by now standard tag-based URL addressing scheme (e.g. guess what sort of books you'd find addressed like this: http://reader2.com/tag/robot?
Library Thing is another social book cataloguing site that again offers users the option of tagging their books, and sharing those tags with others.
When I get a chance, I'll try and pop up a screencast comparing these two sites. In the meantime, if you know of a link to a good review, or even a screencast of either of these sites in action, please post a comment, or perhaps tag it for me (psychemedia) via del.icio.us...
There were several possible benefits - for potential students wanting to see what sorts of stuff they'd be letting themsleves in for if they took the course (they would of course be able to browse inside a book on Amazon, or via Google print); for academics, looking to see what the rest of the academic community was recommending their students to read; for the students - possibly - having a comprehensive booklist with single click purchase or library reservation etc etc.
At the time, I thought you could get quite a long way into this by repurposing Amazon wishlists, but now there are a few 'social book cataloguing' sites that would suit the bill admirably.
Reader2 has very pretty AJAX interface that pulls in book covers from your tagged and catalogued books, and by now standard tag-based URL addressing scheme (e.g. guess what sort of books you'd find addressed like this: http://reader2.com/tag/robot?
Library Thing is another social book cataloguing site that again offers users the option of tagging their books, and sharing those tags with others.
When I get a chance, I'll try and pop up a screencast comparing these two sites. In the meantime, if you know of a link to a good review, or even a screencast of either of these sites in action, please post a comment, or perhaps tag it for me (psychemedia) via del.icio.us...
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