Sunday, April 09, 2006

Netflix for books!

I just thought to myself "wouldn't it be awesome if there were a Netflix for books. You could ship books back and forth, you only need 2 books at a time out because it takes longer to read books than watch movies, and shipping could be a bit slower to save money."

Then I realized: yeah, use a library.

But a big part of the Netflix experience is not simply being a place to get movies. It's having a queue of the next movies I want to see, it's getting recommendations about which movies I might like. I would really enjoy a site like that for books.

I use Amazon for that to some extent - Amazon knows what books I own (both through what I've purchased there, and what I've told it I own). But it's not the same as the Netflix experience.

So, for the moment, I still rely on friends for book recommendations. I wonder when that will end.

[Edit: Apparently it exists at booksfree.com. But I'd love some way for my library to do it for me intelligently - some kind of intelligent system tied into borrowing]

2 comments:

Martin Davidsson said...

I said the same thing and people told me what you told yourself.. "it's called a library." But I also think there's more to it than that. I'll have to check out this booksfree.com site.

ark said...

hows about mediachest.com?