A company is taking on the mighty Amazon in online booksales – with BookRabbit’s blend of social networking and community hoping to put a friendlier spin on book buying.
The increasing trend in book sales is for stores to focus on a handful of well-known titles, with publishers often paying to ensure their key titles are ‘front of house’.
Passion
However, BookRabbit’s overriding premise is that books are voted for by readers – taking the hype out of the equation and letting quality and passion speak for itself.
Perhaps the most novel part of BookRabbit is that it allows the user to upload pictures of their bookcase and ‘tag’ their books with information – which then allows them to see which people have the closest match in terms of similar titles.
Staid and sterile
“The community defines which books make the front page,” Managing Director Kieron Smith told TechRadar. “I felt that buying books online was a staid and sterile experience where I never discovered anything new.
“I don’t think you are likely to browse Amazon but we are hoping that we give people a book experience and allow them to strike up conversations with people who have similar books to them.”
It’s certainly a nice concept, and only time will tell if community can begin to challenge the huge online stores that have currently cornered much of the online book sales market.
Check out BookRabbit for yourself here.
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Your comments (1) Click to add a new comment
zoydwheeler
May 22nd 2008
1. Still think http://www.abebooks.co.uk/ provides the best online book-buying experience. Surely they are the real competition to beat here?
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