Readers Only Need One Place?

ReadersPlace aims to be the social networking site for book clubs, offering global interaction, debate and thoughts about their favourite books. They can web chat with authors live, get reading guides to more than 200 titles including author details and interviews, plot summaries, starting points for discussions and suggested further reading. Of course their will be promotional and discount deal offered at www.rbooks.co.uk.

West Midlands Library Authorities have been part of the pilot helping to develop the site and comes on the back of many innovative new services from Random House.

We welcome this more social engagement with readers and linking authors to their readers in every way possible. Our only comment is that its Random House and what a difference it would be if it embraced more publishers both large and small and all books. At a time when Richard and Judy are being put to rest and a simple twitter from Jonathan Ross can generate a twitter storm and best seller, one questions why its so hard for publishers and retailers to collaborative and embrace an inclusive model and approach? Some would say that its every man for himself and publishers are all after the same sale, but some would suggest the bigger prize is being lost and there are now some big gorillas sitting in the back yard who also don’t understand collaboration.

We believe that if say the major six UK distributors, all of which are owned by the major publishers, actually collaborated to create a joint social network it would probably cover 75% of the UK market and more importantly provide a real incentive for everyone to participate from the authors to th readers and that sales would flow to the deserving but the buzz would be significant. There again we are only dreamers.