A new book wiki.

[Wintermute]

I'm looking to start a new wiki for books, but the thing is even when i upload everything on all the books i own i still wont nearly have enough to start a sucesfull community, I was wondering if anyone would be interested in starting this project with me me to get the ball rolling before it's open to the public, i'm also up to sugestions for what should go on each book page, how it should be layed out, etc. So if you're interested in helping out or have some sugestions please email me at:

squee.uk [at] gmail [dot] com

Thankyou!

edit: it says no advertising, but i'm not sure if this is advertising as it's more of a book lovers community product than trying to sell something, so if this is still against the rules, please just delete it, my deepest appolagies.

 

[Stewart]

Don't you think with the likes of LibraryThing, Shelfari, and GoodReads already out there, to say nothing of Wikipedia itself, that your energy would be better used elsewhere?

 

[Wintermute]

Not really, i think it would be nice to have this kind of thing more focoused on books rather than everything(wikipedia) and a fun project and site for book lovers, i'm sure many people will agree, also it would have a lot more features than wiki does as it's geared towards just books.

 

[Stewart]

Not really, i think it would be nice to have this kind of thing more focoused on books rather than everything(wikipedia) and a fun project and site for book lovers, i'm sure many people will agree, also it would have a lot more features than wiki does as it's geared towards just books.

Yes, that's why I mentioned LibraryThing, Shelfari, and GoodReads, which all offer, to a voluminour degree, what you are proposing.

 

[Wintermute]

Yea, kind of, just not in the way that i want.

 

[sparkchaser]

I dunno. The regular wikipedia has a lot of books there. It seems kinda silly to reinvent the wheel.

 

[Wintermute]

Yes, but there is a lot of stuff it does not have which i hope to code in, i'm still brainstorming, but i look to add an area for user reviews, a rating system, a top 100 list for each genre which works off of the user rating system, and as it is book only it would encourage people to go into more detail about different things within the books which often does not happen on wikipedia which is usualy rather broad.

 

[Peder]

Wintermute,
Trying to be constructive here, I'll say that the top 100 lists for each genre sound different, but GoodReads seems to cover the other features you offer. And I'm not sure those feature are so heavily used there, so GoodReads might be worth your looking hard at for a possible example of how well you own venture might go.
One further thought. It seems to me you need a strongly focussed statment of a feature of your site that is a selling point to cause people to go there, something that strongly differentiates it from the other sites mentioned.
But good luck if you try it.

 

[fluffy bunny]

Agreed. The issue is that even with a few helpers, there are far too many books out there to cover comprehensively. You'll be competing against a number of sites on the internet to attract people to input book information beyond a blurb. On top of that you need to offer more than blurbs which can be found on amazon. If you want book, cultural and cultural context, how it was recieved, awards, how it stacks up etc then you're talking several hours per book. If you just want to type in book blurbs, what does your site offer beyond amazon which also has reader reviews?

A number of those other sites mentioned above that cover similar topics have had up to a ten year head start on you. It's going to be difficult to pull off.

 

[ibookdb]

You might want to check out The Internet Book Database (my site), Internet Book List, Interenet Book Database of Fiction, Fantastic Fiction, Internet Speculative Fiction Database etc. and maybe contribute to one of them. I know I'm open to suggestions, I'm sure the others are too.