Similarities: Booklamp and the Music industry

[George Pickett]

I just found out tonight about booklamp and it seems really exciting. I see this as something that can change the face of reading books if you do it right. The hardest part is going to be just getting scanned material in here. I digress...

My prediction for a possible future of booklamp:


As booklamp becomes popular more authors tailor their writing style to fit what readers like. Writing and reading will become more part of pop culture, which is good for the advancement of humans and technology.

Inspired writers will do to writing what the internet did to music. More genres will emerge as a result of the shift in the barrier to entry. Eventually writers' works could be rated like on digg or youtube and popular articles/books will be on the front page.

I'm looking forward to this project and hope the best for you.

[Stephen Rollins]

One of the things BookLamp is aiming to avoid is a popularity contest.  While I sure wouldn't mind books being more widely popular, I disagree that BookLamp can be used to show authors what writing styles people like any more than just monitoring their sales like normal.  The only difference is that, using BookLamp, it's more likely that new authors with books people haven't heard of will be discovered and read.  It's not like there's some set formula to how to write books that will increase sales any more than there's just one style of music that you can expect every person to want to buy. 

[Todd Lenhart]

I agree. I don't think that there would really be a way to write a book based on what you can find on BookLamp. The only way to do this would to be if you were to know exactly how the system works. Even then it might not work, to a more broad appeal, because there are so many different interests. Once there are more books in the system, and even now, BookLamp will be a great resource. Whether or not it becomes like digg.

I do like the more genres approach though...