Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was Travis Alber, the co-founder of ReadSocial–a start-up connecting books and social networks. Click here to listen to the interview (MP3 link).
ReadSocial just launched Readum, an extension for the Firefox and Chrome browsers that allows readers to highlight any paragraph in a Google Book, add a note, and then share the book excerpt on Facebook. The process is outlined in the video embedded above.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview: “If your book is on the Google Books platform right now, you have a page. You could make a comment [about a paragraph in your book] and send it out. The comment could be a question or additional information about what you were trying to convey with that paragraph. There are a lot of ways to create very personal interaction–almost like you would in a book reading.”
Alber concluded: “A lot of people don’t know this, but you can add the authors and books you like [to your Facebook page]. We’ve integrated that into Readum as well–making it easier for you to jump from Facebook all the way out to Google Books to find those books to comment on… I think it will encourage people to add books to their profile on Facebook. Which is important, because 500 million people are on Facebook and (if you believe Facebook) half those people log in every day. They should be talking about books as much as they are talking about everything else.”