Forum

I have a friend who regularly calls to discuss the versions of a recipe we each have in our cookbook collections. I have just joined Eat Your Books.

I have been waiting years for someone to tackle the obvious need for a service like yours. I had imagined that it would be Google, as they're already scanning everything and it is within their programmers' grasp to automate this. You'll survive by exploiting the certainty that whatever they do won't have as narrow a focus, and thus will be more awkward to use for this purpose.

To my dismay, I don't see any mechanism for searching another user's bookshelf as if it were my own. As the books themselves become public information, this is hardly a privacy issue. One should be able to search any bookshelf one can physically access, without depriving you of the revenue of multiple accounts.

Put differently, by creating some value to having friends' bookshelves on the same network, you insure your survival by reaching critical mass before a competitor in this specific domain. Right now, I'm having trouble seeing the value of having my friends on your service. If there were competing services, we'd simply conclude "cool concept!" and each choose our own.

I am holding off for a few days on discussing my membership with my friend. There seems to be a few approaches:

[1] Two memberships, and exchange passwords to search each other's bookshelves.

[2] One shared membership, and use tags to identify locations of books.

[3] Two memberships, and get you to implement a "search a friend's bookshelf" feature?

[4] You cite terms of service and close my account.

I don't see [1] as a viable option. [4] gets into definitions of family and relationship thart are no one's business. We'll go with [2] unless we can figure out [3]. I'd think that you'd dearly want the money from [3], which is why it surprises me that I can't find this feature.

In lots of realms people channel all their creativity into a core concept, then think conventionally about related issues. (Haskell is the smartest programming language in common use, yet the resarch papers are all two-column targeted for letter or A4 paper.) My fear from reading other threads is that you view [3] as the whole "social media" ball of wax, and are paralyzed about doing anything until you can take Facebook head on. Everyone in business is terrified of social media and how they're not handling it well, and thinking conventionally about the problem because they're in an insecure "catch up" stance. In fact, you will be most successful enabling very specific behaviors that people actually need, for the narrow common purpose that draws us together here.

Put differently, think of the 60 year history of man machine communication. The fundamental bottleneck has always been finding something to talk about. [3] is a very clearly delineated transaction, which has absolutely nothing to do with social media in general. While people were wondering if they'd ever successfully talk with a machine, they were of course already talking with machines in ways like [3].

Thank you for your thoughtful post.  Your analysis follows a lot of our own thinking in this area.  When the site first launched we did in fact have a feature that allowed you to search other members' Bookshelves.  As part of a major site redvelopment we had to drop that feature but we have always intended to reinstate it as part of the development of social networking on the site.  We aren't paralysed by the fear of taking on Facebook head on, more paralyzed by not having Facebook's vast income.  We have to prioritize our development dollars and a lot of our budget for now is around building our site membership.

Once the site membership (and revenue) reaches a level that allows it, we will definitely be developing features that allow more interaction between members.  We know from the success of sites like ChowHound how much people like to discuss cooking and cookbooks, so we want EYB to be the international site where cookbook lovers share their experiences.

I would say you should go with option 1 / 3, knowing we do plan to introduce the feature to allow you to search other members' Bookshelves.  You and your friends can set up the same password for your separate accounts to make things easier.  Just remember to be logged into your own account before adding any Notes or Forum posts.  Then once we add the social networking features, you can make your accounts private again by changing your password.

Thanks! I am loving your site.