Saturday, December 27, 2008

BookSprouts and the new HighTouch book club

A small group of us-- like three, have been discussing the idea of creating an online book club for ages. We talked about doing it in a wiki, and even started collecting a reading list. We are busy folks, however, and the concept always seemed to slip to the back burner of good ideas that we never acted on.

So when I was browsing Crunchbase today this new Web 2.0 startup immediately caught my attention: Booksprouts:

The goal of Booksprouts is to make Book Clubs a Fun and Easy experience for everyone. We want to do the hard and tedious parts for you so that you can get busy reading and discussing!

What are some of the hard and tedious parts you ask? Good question. Booksprouts introduces Book Choices to help book clubs agree on what to read. We automatically create and organize online discussion spaces for each book. And we help clubs manage their member lists and their club meetings.

Works for me. This is something we've been talking about doing for a long time, and BookSprouts looks to make it easy. So, I'm ready to kick the tires.

I've created the Hightouch book club, the place for us to read and discuss books that touch on the intersection of technology and culture (loosely defined). I've nominated a couple of books for reading, but it's a social site, and y'all can suggest books for the club to read. The site has a database of pretty much every book ever written so adding new suggestions is super easy. I set the initial ramp-up period on the longish side--10 days. Please join, suggest books, and be ready to cast your vote for our first read.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi,
Good luck with your book club.

You might find some inspiration from Bookshelved which has been running for several years now. It's basically your idea of a wiki for people who like to read. It gives us a place to track what we're reading, what other people are reading and write reviews.

It doesn't have any Web2.0 features but we like it. Take a look

test said...

Glad you found this resource. BookSprouts looks a lot like what we wanted in the Virtual Book Club.
http://blog.k1v1n.com/2008/12/booksprouts-and-new-hightouch-book-club.html
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