There are a number of other sites that do business book summaries:
- getabstract.com
- bizsum.com
- summaries.com
What I'm attempting to do is change the model a little bit. They all have professional reviews, and charge a lot of money for a number of summaries every year. For people who are willing to pay, they may even offer better summaries, although the standard format might be a bit limiting.
But what they don't have is any sort of discussion/feedback or anything else beyond getting the summary itself. My reasoning is that people will be interested in the summary, but get more out of being able to discuss the ideas presented.
'... But what they don't have is any sort of discussion/feedback or anything else beyond getting the summary itself ...'
Amazon does this. It was the subject of that great book (Amazonia, Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut ~ http://tinyurl.com/364d9f ) and tells the story of Bezos hiring employee #55, 'James Marcus' as book editor asking him ... "how many 100 word reviews can you write in x minutes?" - The implication being he wanted to find ways to scale reviews beyond employees writing 100 word reviews.
".... why do computer users take time away from their own lives and work to help people around the world whom they don't even know? ..."
Now your 'stab' at this has a good chance of doing better, if you can solve the problem of why people write free documentation (supply) and allow the creation of something that people want to read (demand). The reviews at Amazon are 'ok' but lack follow-up. There's a great article I found on "Why Do People Write Free Documentation?" and some conclusions after asking a questionnaire that might answer some questions you have on this ~ http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/7062
As for the site, I like it. Signed up, got an account & checked a title, modified my bio. Pretty easy. Found the book I searched for ( http://tinyurl.com/34dsnb ) So if I write comments, add comments can I consume this data? Use it beyond going to a page? What I would like to see (more of) is
- choice of licenses (creative commons) to release any writing
- access to rss, atom feeds, collective & personal OR an API to query data
- access to stats on the books & reviews (titles, who wrote what, how many words)
All of which allow you to not only add to the site but add to the value of the data by consuming it in your own blogs, products etc.
Thanks for the feedback - it's a good feeling to see someone thinking about what I've started creating, and I appreciate it.
Amazon is certainly a giant that could probably wipe out both my site and some of the others in a minute if they chose. On the other hand, being so big means that they don't have the focus, so people go for the reviews, but that notwithstanding, there seems to be a thriving summary business, so I guess they're not satisfied with reviews, and that's understandable. Reviews are teasers and opinions on the merits of the book rather than attempts at faithful summaries of the book's key points.
Now, some of your points:
Licenses - yes... I've been mulling that over. The issue is of course how much control to give up. Too little, and perhaps people will be less interested in contributing. More data (what does everyone here think?) would be useful.
RSS/Atom is a high priority item to add - its usefulness is obvious. The question in my mind is what to create a feed for - new books added? Newly added books are at their most useless stage, because they don't have a summary just yet (hopefully one gets added soon, but still). It would be easy to add feeds for summary updates, but perhaps that would be sort of annoying for minor updates.
Stats are another area I'm working on. First and foremost is to visually display who contributed how much to any given summary, so that people can't just change a word or two and get marked as a contributor.
