Reading is no longer a solitary affair and book clubs are moving online. The New York Times technology blog’s review of the Social Reading app makes the point that reading has become as much about communicating what you’re reading as the act itself.
Jason Johnson, one of the entrepreneurs behind Social Books, told the NYT “Short-form content on the web is very interactive, very dynamic. You can see which of your friends read the same article and what they thought of it. It made us ask, ‘Can this be applied to long-form content? Can we take the advent of social media and apply it to the way we read books on tablets?’”
Like the Nook Colour, the Social Books app allows readers to cut and paste quotes and write their own reviews. Already it’s being called Facebook for booklovers, but it will face the same problem as iBooks - limited books and the difficulty of finding publishing partners.