A day late, I know - but we were all on vacation yesterday, so…

According to my earlier survey of Infodoodads readers, many of you have LibraryThing accounts, and some of you enjoy those accounts most in all the world.  I like LibraryThing for a great many reasons, one of them being that they seem to have a good relationship with libraries.  Over at TechCrunch, an article points out that Amazon has just purchased Abebooks and Shelfari, which might be problematic for LibraryThing in the near future, because Abebooks owns 40% of Librarything, and Shelfari is a LibraryThing competitor.

This of course has got me thinking about the whole book-centric social networking scene, and wondering where it all might be headed in the near future as giant corporations try to monetize blah blah blah.  Like, Amazon suddenly has access to millions more book lovers, and can place ads on their pages that target their interests.  Granted, some people might find that helpful - you love the works of Neal Stephenson, and all of a sudden there’s an ad on your page for Neal’s latest book, linked to Amazon.  Then you think to yourself, “Hey, I think I’ll buy that incredibly over-priced hardback that will depreciate in value faster than a new SUV!”  That’s nice if you like the feeling of money bleeding out of every pour in your body.  I’d rather see somebody like OCLC buy LibraryThing (or another book-centric social network) and do the same thing with advertising, only sending people to the WorldCat page, where they can see if their library has it, and if it doesn’t they can request that their library get it through interlibrary loan.