LibraryThing Early Reviewers + Collections

A 2.0 service that I’ve been enjoying a lot is LibraryThing. Like GoodReads and Shelfari, it’s based around the idea of a personal library or reading list.

Users maintain a catalogue by adding books from a wide range (660+ from around the world) of available databases, although Amazon will usually have what you’re looking for.

I’ve been using my catalogue to track my post-bacc summer reading push, since we all know it’s not just in medicine that the word accountability is key! The litany of features including a speedy review/rating system, recommended reading, calculators (every wonder what your dead author/live author ratio is???), and community zeitgeist are truly excellent.

Early Reviewers

Today, I logged my latest conquest (About A Boy by Nick Hornby – even better than the movie! Can you tell I have a Hornby obsession?) and noted that the June batch of Early Reviewers books were in.

I think Early Reviewers is such a great idea. Basically, LibraryThing aims to help authors build word-of-mouth hype before the formal publication date. It does this by giving away free books in exchange for reviews of those books. Here’s how it works:

• Register for the Early Reviewers program for free. Provide your mailing address.
• Every month, LibraryThing posts new books with plot summaries and the countries that the publisher is willing to ship to.
• Requesting books is as easy as clicking a button. The site shows you how many copies are available and how many people have requested so far.
• At the end of the requesting period, LibraryThing will notify you if you’ve been selected to receive a book.

Who doesn’t love free stuff? It reminds me of Food for Thought in my undergrad, which the Faculty framed as sessions during which they fed us in exchange for our opinions.

It would be great to have something similar in place for science and medicine. Getting early reviews from knowledgeable peers could be excellent help for scientific writers, whether it be pre-publication journal articles or university textbooks.

Sort of similar to that idea, Nature (see ScienceRoll’s excellent Why Nature is the Best in Science 2.0) has something right now called Precedings, a community where researchers post preliminary scientific communications to get feedback and (in a way) stake their claims on ideas before publication. I checked it out this week – so far, looks promising, but there’s not too much on there yet. As CBC reported in January, the obstacle might be changing the stiff paradigm of peer-reviewed science that’s been the standard for the last century:

While these are only a sampling of scientific Web 2.0 projects, Nielsen says the shift faces significant obstacles. The biggest, he says, is a scientific culture that emphasizes formal publication as the key to prestige, funding and academic tenure.

"You build your career by publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals," he says. "You don’t do it by contributing to wikis."

What is needed is a way of recognizing contributions to wikis and other online resources, Nielsen says — and there is evidence it can happen.

More on this topic in the future; I’m certainly interested in what happens when web 2.0 really does become accepted as having transcended the Facebook/Myspace world. I think that the current zeitgeist is still something like furiously trying to build as many sites as possible catering to as many “hobby” activities as possible (music, video, games, books…) – and in fact, sort of tying into my earlier post on the Twitter team’s defense of its own Twitter use: the average user is still not convinced. There is a big divide between the power user and the person who signed up to see what’s it’s like. And right now, the site’s target demographic is most likely not the power-user.

But anyway.

For now, gotta love LibraryThing.*

*My only real gripe with LibraryThing is that the visuals are not as “pretty” as its competitors. I’ve been wracking my brain and I can only say that it’s 2.0 in concept and functionality, but kind of looks 1.0. I even think it might be using frames. But oh well.