A friend of mine told me about BookRabbit a little while ago and Mike mentioned it on TechCrunch recently. It’s an interesting take on using books as social objects (that’s whay we will always still buy them IMHO).

Basically, BookRabbit is a place to meet people, look at the books they own, share opinions about books, listen to authors talking about their works and create categories for books that really make sense. That’s what the press release said. Here’s what makes in intriguing and potentially pretty useful to me – an avid book collector and sharer.

 

BookRabbit.com enables customers to upload pictures of their bookcases to the site, so readers can look at the book collections of other people who have the same titles and interests as them. This can offer the ability to make serendipitous book discoveries, just as you would if you were physically in someone's house, rifling through their collections. This is a great way to find and buy books, but also a fun way to strike up conversations about the books you enjoy.  

 

Here is my first bookshelf on the site.

They’re also using crowdsourcing to classify over 4m books in their list. Nice. I think it’s a very cool idea – we all spent ages nosing around other people’s profiles on Facebook and this takes a similar approach. People can nose around each others bookshelves and as Hermione says, it’s one of life’s great pleasures.

Meantime, I’m presenting at a librarians conference in Liverpool in October so thinking I may wander in to the Picton Library, takes a few snaps, upload and scare the crap out of them!

Final thought – this would be a great service if it used DeepZoom and Silverlight for deeper furrowing!