Amazon rolls out a social network for Kindle | Hacker News Reader

Amazon rolls out a social network for Kindle

kindle.amazon.com

66 pointsjsavimbi30 comments

The biggest problem with this is that my wife and I share our Amazon account. Although we have our own Kindles, we use the same Amazon account because we're not going to buy two copies of every book that we both want to read. If we had to do this, we would probably buy the paper version. So, my "stats", highlights, and my account information include everything she has done with her Kindle.

Until Amazon lets us have separate accounts (or somehow separate our reading), this will be relatively useless for us. We can't even separately rate books, or mark books as "hope to read", "reading", etc. and we're not going to buy double copies just for that purpose. I suspect this is the same for many others.

This is definitely one of my biggest complaints as well. I'd love to see them follow the lead of Amazon Prime and let me specify other accounts within my household that I want to be able to share books (and perhaps other media) with.

Absolutely. My wife and I do the same thing with content from the iTunes store via Home Sharing. No way we'd buy separate copies of electronic books.

why don't you just strip the DRM on the books you buy? It won't help with the social network stuff because Kindle doesn't "see" the stripped versions of the book, but it would allow you to have two accounts for the purposes of 'hope to read', 'reading', etc

No doubt many people do this already. But you shouldn't have to. That technique exists only because DRM has utterly failed to deal with reality.

These comments are specifically about the "social network stuff" and my point is that Amazon's "social network" is useless to me because my wife and I are required to share the same Amazon account if we don't want to double purchase Kindle books.

What benefit would stripping the DRM of the books we buy bring us? We can currently read the books on both our Kindles (allows up to 5 devices), we just can't separate our accounts. How would we get our DRM-stripped Kindle books to show up on separate kindle.amazon.com accounts (putting aside the hassle of not being able to just directly download them on our Kindles)?

How does one do that?

Perhaps this is why Apple's Ping also failed - many legitimate buyer accounts are "small buyer groups" and do not represent individuals?

Personally, I think Ping failed because Apple threw a party and no one cared.

Ditto. I've been an Amazon user since the late 90s. They've got an incredible amount of user data about me, including wishlists with thousands of items. That all ends about two years ago. This is when I started buying digital books on my wife's account.

She's not much of an Amazon user, but I bought her a Kindle as a gift first, so...we already had a bunch of digital books attached to her account. So now Amazon has a lot of data about a sort of split personality woman who likes anthropology, travel, cooking, etc. as well as math, programming, photography, etc. This is a massive fail and a loss to Amazon in my mind.

The reason I don't want to buy two of everything, aside from the obvious fact that I don't do this in the real world (i.e., physical books), is that I don't expect these copies to be valid in 10 years. Any DRM-based data is likely to become invalid over time unless it's eventually stripped. Why would I pay twice for that? In addition, it's lower fidelity than the physical book or an equivalent PDF. So I'll probably have to buy it again anyway.

Apple figured this out and now sells MP3s and, ironically, Amazon also sells DRM-free MP3s. I'm sure they're trying to bring publishers into the 21st century. They're just not doing it very well yet.

It's been out for a while, and although it's really promising, a large number of obvious features are completely missing. For example there's no RSS feeds of a user's activity and there's no "per-book" pages (it'd be nice if you could point friends to a page that shows your review of the book, plus the passages you've highlighted/noted). There's a list of books you own, but there's no way to search the list. Also, the "Daily Review" feature is broken (I get the same book every day).

I think it could be a really useful site if Amazon would invest in it a little. But it seems as if they've given up on it, since nothing seems to have change since the site was launched. (Also, I haven't seen any review mention it, so perhaps people don't care.)

Why does everything have to be social? Reading for me is a profoundly private experience. I get away from the world, I get away from people, and I sit alone and read. It's a way of relaxing and refreshing myself without worrying about the kinds of things that Amazon is attempting to inject into the Kindle with this.

I think the actual reading is a private experience, but finding what to read next is often a social experience.

Yes, I don't want anyone talking in the cinema while I'm watching a film, but I may want to talk about it afterwards.

Seeing which parts others liked and highlighted, the digital equivalent of dog-earing, gives a nice extra touch to my reading experience.

I'd rather they released their SDK publicly instead of this. It has been in beta for a year now, I think.

No kidding. And it seems to be a very private beta. I'd love to write something for a Kindle, I'd run out and buy one in an instant if I could, but they've been dragging their heels for a very long time. Heck, I wouldn't even mind if the entire system changed every couple months, breaking API changes and all - something is better than nothing.

Not only this, but if you look through the KDK API, you'll see that it's quite limited. For example, there's no API to manage collections.

It seems to me that the KDK is a token offer and that they probably have no plans on actually making good (or available) until they have to.

The next ebook reader I get will not be a Kindle.

I have yet to try out any book-reading software, but this looks like the killer social app that will convince me to choose Kindle rather than Nook. If the new Google book reader links tightly with Google+, as one would expect to happen soon, then I will commit to the Google product.

(I still read books the old-fashioned way, and my house is decorated in the Industrial Bookshelf style. One of the things I like best to do online is to discuss books and the ideas found in them.)

P.S. Thanks for the reply about Goodreads. I was an early adopter of Goodreads, starting an account at the suggestion of a friend in another state, but I stopped using it right away, because of its somewhat tedious interface, and no longer trust Goodreads at all since I saw Google results from searches on my name that included spurious Goodreads pages that appeared to promote books that I've never read. (I ego surf on the major search engines from time to time precisely to see what spoofing is being done in my name. I reported the Goodreads fake page problem to Google last year.) I do have friends who still like Goodreads a lot, but I'm thinking a tighter integration with an ebook reader has to be a beneficial feature for an online social network, and vice versa.

There is also http://www.goodreads.com/, a feature packed (maybe too much) and a generic (as in not tied to any reading app/device/mode) ... how shall I put it? reading management solution with a social flavour to it.

I wonder why Amazon decided not to incorporate Kindle support into already existing Shelfari [1], which seems to have much prettier UI and bigger user base.

[1]　http://www.shelfari.com/, Amazon's social network for readers

Amazon seems to take a hands-off approach with almost all of their acquisitions.

This has been out a while and I always thought it had a lot of potential, but they haven't really pushed it.

One barrier to more use of the service myself is their URL strategy. I don't know my own link and, in the past anyway, it wasn't easy to navigate to my profile.

Yeah, this has been around for months with no push from Amazon for some reason. I'm not sure many Kindle owners are even aware that kindle.amazon.com exists and that they can view their highlights and notes there.

Seeing what your friends are reading and highlighting would be interesting.

What's the news? What's new? kindle.amazon.com has been around for months, why is this posted now?

It actually launched over a year ago, this probably ended up posted here because Tom Anderson just discovered it and posted about it on Google+ in the last couple of days.

I hoping for full integration with Goodreads, or we fall into the classic problem of redundant social networks.

Hopefully this will encourage not just book learning, but knowledge sharing and vigorous discourse!

I'd rather they "rolled out" cheaper ebooks tbh (or at least encouraged publishers to do so)

If they had bought Lendle or even just implemented the idea, it might actually be useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com