Books! Weren’t they the first ‘shares’? Definitely for me. I’d borrow/lend books when I was a kid. Then dissect the stories with my friends. That’s what we do on Facebook/Twitter now — share and discuss content.

As I’ve alluded over and over again, I read a lot of books (they’re probably becoming an obsession now!) and most of the reading is on my iPhone or iPad’s Kindle app.

Just today I read a piece by Eugene Wei on how Amazon could develop the Kindle service into a full-blown social network. It surely has lots of potential — perfect for a highly-engaged audience.

First, who is this Eugene?

Eugene is a Stanford grad who worked at Amazon for 7 years. Left Amazon to become a filmmaker and joined up at the UCLA film school. He dropped out within a year to join a then-fledgling company named Hulu.

In 2011, he founded a startup called Erly and sold it to Airtime within a year. For the last 2 years, he has been serving as the Head of Product at Flipboard. So yes, he knows a little something about tech consumer products.

What is the Kindle social network?

It’s my dream! Seriously — I’ve been thinking about the very features Eugene lays out in the post. And, I couldn’t have articulated them better. You should definitely read it, but I’d also like to highlight a few portions I loved.

• Feed with Book Passages

What I’d love is for my Kindle to open into some type of home feed that sits on top of my entire Kindle library, serving up chunks from all the books I’m reading into small chunks, interweaving them into what would be something like a series of blog posts.
…
These passages would be short enough to read in one sitting, or perhaps you could dial in a rough range of how large a chunk of information you want served up at a time.

An example of how this could play out is the Reuters TV app, which asks for how much time you have and then packages the day’s news accordingly to fit into that time window.

Kind of like creating an RSS feed meets Medium for books — with a time value built in.

• Social Highlights

The reading social network I want is around discussing ideas in the text itself. I want the ability to see the notes and highlights of my friends on books we’ve both purchased, and I want the ability to respond to their notes, or at least to like them.

I’ve actually been looking for a way to share my Kindle highlights with my network. Unfortunately, there isn’t any good way to do so. But, it’s probably the best way to discuss reading material with peers.

Anyhow, go read😀

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