Keeping books locked down as they do is keeping Amazon from realizing some really great apps for “Socializing” the discussion of books online.   I have been Tweeting and Facebook posting quotes from the books Ive been reading on my Kindle Fire for the past couple years.  But I am constantly frustrated by the absence of that SHARE feature on any of the Kindle Readers OTHER than the Kindle devices.  I simply prefer to use my PC or Laptop keyboard to share comments,  rather than the rather small,  and too-oft unresponsive touch screen keyboard of the Kindle Fire.

Why is it that Kindle does not make this feature available in the one place where it makes MORE sense than it does on the “portable device/Kindle reader”?

There seems to be a big gap in the availability of apps for making book discussions and sharing accessible on The Net.  It seems to me this is a big lost opportunity.  And I’m perplexed as to how,  with all it’s power and creativity in the online world,  that Amazon has been so absent here.  They did introduce the SHARE feature for the Kindle reader devices.  But why have the y stopped adding to that idea?

Library Thing made a big splash with their Library collection and entry apps (gave me a use for the Cue Cat software as well,  which WIRED mag had sent me years ago when they had this idea for scan codes in magazines for advertisers to link the readers to their websites.  Library Thing wrote an app for users to utilize this bar-code scanner to capture the ISBN codes and bring up the data for a book to be entered in to their library collection.  Library Thing also made it possible to connect to other users who had the same books,  and also to discussions on those books.  But the Social connectivity there,  as far as I can tell,  is lacking other than via forums on the Library Thing website itself.

This takes me back to my days at a denominational Publishing House.   Theological books would seem to be VERY fertile ground for online discussion.  The directors there were not seeing it.  And the bookstore website has only joined the Social Media to the extent of providing “Share” Social Media buttons,  but for purposes of people “Sharing” the link to the item,  which I think is wishful thinking.  People want to talk about the books,  not help them sell them (which , ironaically,  WOULD be helping them sell them).

This puts me in a state of mind to go look at some of the offerings or attempts out there in building communities based on books.  Really surprising how very little there is other than Amazon for good book discussion (other than the Book Review articles that often bring massive trolling,  especially if they are on “hot button issues”,  or issue that certain theological trolls have selected as their flavor of the day/week/month/year.