Bringing together social and sales

There are great websites to talk about the books you love, like GoodReads, Shelfari or LibraryThing, and there are great sites to buy those books, like Amazon or Barnes & Noble. But until now I haven't seen a site integrate the two things and build a place where people can be social about the books they're reading and love and buy them all in one place.

That's what The Reading Room is up to. I found out about this site this morning while reading Digital Publishing World, so thank you again to Jeremy Greenfield for introducing me to a great new network.

TheReadingRoom.com is based in Australia and currently has about 500,000 members, which is far fewer than the other social reading sites I listed above. But it is a lot of people, and by their own statement, The Reading Room is not trying to compete with Amazon or B&N on sales, but focus on niches where people read and buy many, many similar books throughout the year.

It's a fascinating focus that I think is a twist on the trend of food and small business going local in the offline world. As communities of readers collect around genre, conversation and recommendations, it only makes sense that there would be a site like this that allows them to do all of those things in one place.

And while the idea of combining social and sales around eBooks onto one site is a breakthrough, it's far from the only awesome thing about the site. They also offer a way for readers to sign up to get advance reading copies of books and a free branded eBook Reader software.

To me, that means The Reading Room has everything in place to be the home for groups of passionate readers around niche genres who will get advance reading copies and then read them, talk about them and share them all on branded software from The Reading Room.

That's powerful, and I'm very interested to see how they grow. 

Image courtesy of TheReadingRoom.com homepage screenshot