Three mails in my inbox, all relating to an interest of mine – reading, but at three levels of engaging me. The easiest one to discuss is Rediff Books, which in a very matter of fact way gave me a list of books, including a 10 day MBA, how to save Income Tax, and ‘The Chronicles of Narnai’ (sic). It informed me that I had expressed an interest in receiving such information. I did? Reading, I’d say is a great vertical for a social network, but Rediff Books doesn’t seem to think so.<\/p>\n
The second mail was from Shelfari, which gives me a status on what people in my network are doing. Now, I had signed up on Shelfari a while back, and had updated it for quite a while. My old blog even had a shelf I’d found cute. But somewhere down the line, its interface and utility ceased to interest me. I got quite irritated with their search which never managed to find my friends for me, only for me to get a mail from them later, not by them finding me, but on how they found this an interesting site, and wanted me to join. That was around the time that i became a Facebook fan, and found Visual Bookshelf. And why was that? Because Shelfari’s app on Facebook refused to work for me inspite of several tries. Now, to be fair, I might have been a rare case since I see a lot of people using it.<\/p>\n
The interesting news last week, was Amazon’s acquisition<\/a> of Shelfari, which leads to a strange relationship <\/a>with its competitor, Library Thing. I noticed from the second link that the UI has been improved considerably, but they’d lost me way before I could experience that.The effects of such a partnership would be beneficial<\/a> to both parties, as Shelfari gains from the scale of Amazon and its users, and Amazon gains a community that it couls scale up and synergise very effectively with its current services. Amazon is doing some interesting stuff, most prominent of which would be Kindle<\/a>.<\/p>\n And that brings me to my favourite utility in this vertical – Visual Bookshelf. The biggest advantage I have is that I get to share it with all my friends on Facebook, and it automatically adds the friends who use the same app. It also means that I get to share a review on my newsfeed, so even those who don’t use the app can read it. VB’s mails to me are pretty simple – it tells me the status of the books I have added, and gives me an option to change it, it lets me know what my friends have added, and in a way I found very appealing, lets me know what the team is working on, and that’s some pretty interesting stuff.<\/p>\n But there is another app I’m considering to give a spin, and that’s ‘Books iRead’, from weRead<\/a>, a team based <\/a>in Bangalore. Its page on FB informs me that it has more than 6.5 lakh users, 25 of whom are friends. I read recently that it had been acquired<\/a> by Lulu<\/a>. Not exactly the Amazon kind of deal, although I couldn’t help but wonder whether the guys who should’ve actually done a tie up with weRead long ago should’ve been another Bangalore based online bookstore start up – Flipkart<\/a>. It could’ve been perhaps as simple as me reviewing a book on Books iRead, a friend reading it and deciding to buy it, and Flipkart offering an option to buy. Now, Flipkart is doing some reasonably good work, and I loved the way they\u00a0 first <\/a>caught my attention, but this would be a good context to remind them that they haven’t gotten back to me on Dublin, a book I’d asked for! But don’t worry, none of the online guys in India have, so there’s reason to cheer. Sigh!! \ud83d\ude10<\/p>\n until next time, Read India<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three mails in my inbox, all relating to an interest of mine – reading, but at three levels of engaging me. The easiest one to discuss is Rediff Books, which in a very matter of fact way gave me a list of books, including a 10 day MBA, how to save Income Tax, and ‘The […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,22,2538],"tags":[2607,4949,2724,93,3376,1681,210,3735,4024,4046],"class_list":["post-7557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-india","category-ideas","tag-amazon","tag-books","tag-books-iread","tag-flipkart","tag-lulu","tag-reading","tag-rediff","tag-shelfari","tag-visual-bookshelf","tag-weread"],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}