Biblio-Social Objects: Copia, Mendeley, LibraryThing and Mongoliad by Eric Hellman

The long awaited Copia e-reading platform finally launched, and the big surprise is that the previously announced devices have disappeared. Copia’s innovation is that it smushes together a bookstore, reading environments that live across devices, and a social network. As such, it’s interesting to look at.

Another recent arrival is the App for Mongoliad, the ambitious collaboration between Neal Stephenson, Greg Baer “and friends”. It’s a serial work built on a custom platform (including both website and apps) that supports multimedia and user-generated content, and it aspires to be a community inside a fictional world containing multiple narratives rather than a novel.

It’s undeniable that books belong in our social networks, but it’s far from obvious how social aspects should fit into the reading experience. Copia is designed with the point of view that the integration should be tight- it allows the sharing of annotations right within the reader application. Mongoliad does that, and more, it invites and rewards reader contributions, even to the point of letting the community influence the narrative. In thinking about how books should fit in to a social network, it’s usefl to look at two thriving social networks built around bibliographic objects, LibraryThing andMendeley.

LibraryThing describes itself as a “social cataloging website”. It helps you catalog your book collection, but it derives its vitality from the way it lets members use your personal catalog to connect with other LibraryThing members. A typical “Thingish” activity going on now isSantaThing, a sort of Secret Santa for Book Lovers. (Sorry it’s too late to join for this year!)

Mendeley is surprisingly similar in function to LibraryThing, but it concentrates on a different set of bibliographic objects- journal articles. Like Copia, it includes a stand-along application, but its core utility is managing references for scientists and scholars. If that’s all it did, it wouldn’t create much excitement- services such as RefWorks, EndNote, Zotero and many others do that job. It’s the emerging community that makes Mendeley special, which has a look and feel reminiscent of Facebook. Mendeley has recently added a public groups feature that helps researchers coalesce around topics defined by articles of interest. Very soon, they’ll be rolling out a feature that connects users with other users based on their reference libraries.

It’s a bit early to judge either Copia or Mongoliad- both shows lots of rough edges and awkwardness, but you expect that in things so new and ambitious. (Random examples- At first, Copia didn’t remember where I was in a book; now it does, and I’m not sure what changed. You have to log in twice because of DRM- once to Copia, and a second time to Adobe. This is soon to be fixed, according to Copia representatives. Mongoliad’s web version has an annoying border trim that made the edges of the page rather hard to read, and the navigation is at times mystifying.) Instead, I’d like to point out two architectural issues that these products raise, and which aren’t likely to change. The answers to these questions are likely to determine their ultimate success or failure.

1. Should reading environments and social activity be tightly coupled or loosely coupled?

Copia is betting that a better user experience will result from the tight-coupling philosophy. Comments and annotations live in the social graph of Copia members and are fed right into the Copia reading applications. It’s the same philosophy that Apple has used for its Ping network with no great success – yet. YouTube’s social networking features could be characterized as being tightly coupled to their video content, and if Copia acheived a fraction of YouTube’s success I’m sure they’ll be quite happy.

The alternative to tight coupling would be loose coupling. There’s no technical reason that users of Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Sony and Kobo reading environments couldn’t all share comments and annotations via Twitter, Facebook and Buzz messaging backbones. Technical frameworks for open annotation are beginning to emerge.

Loose coupling is the way MLB has added social activity to their baseball Apps, and it works well there. Watching baseball is very much a social activity, but that doesn’t mean that people want to build their social network around baseball games. My guess is that reading a book is more like watching a game in terms of the social interactions that work well around it.

Loose coupling to social features would allow users to combine their favorite reading device or application for example, Stanza or Ibis on iPad, their favorite social network, say LibraryThing or GetGlue, and their favorite shopping environment, which might be Amazon or Kobo. Loose coupling makes for more competion, resulting in a more challenging business environment for the provider of the social network. The types of web services present in both LibraryThing and Mendeley (and Facebook and Twitter, for that matter) allow coupling to other services, greatly increasing the footprint of the social network.

Mongoliad, by contrast, is content with extreme coupling to its social network, to the extent that you worry about scaling. While the mongoliad platform supports only one narrative work (not sure if I should call it a book!) the company behind it, Subutai, intend it to be a platform for many different works. How will the community formed by one work interact with other communities on the same platform? will there be narrative leakage?

2. Which comes first,  objects connecting you to friends, or friends connecting you to objects?

This is a chicken and egg question, of course, but the interactions enabled by a social network are of one type or another. In a network like Facebook, the friends come first, and the stream of social interactions can bring along connections to many types of entities, books included. In networks like LibraryThing and Mendeley, it’s the other way around- the books and articles create connections between you and other members of the network.

The reason this question is architecturally important for book- and article- -oriented networks is that it determines whether the objects in your network are works or whether they are products. Products can live in a friend-first network, but they stick out like a sore thumb in book-first social networks, where they really need to be “works”.

To understand what I mean, consider a book I mentioned in a previous post, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History. Copia has a product catalog, not a work catalog, and so there are two separate entries for this work, one an ebook, the other a hardcover. When a paperback comes out, there will be a third entry. It makes very little sense for my social interactions surrounding the hardcover to be separated from similar interactions surrounding the ebook. Other works are much worse. Try loading “Moby Dick” into a Copia library. Although it’s a public domain work, free from Project Gutenberg, you have to pay for the versions available for download in the Copia store. It’s not as bad as Kindle but it’s not as good as Apple’s iBooks; I WAS able to import my iBooks file of Moby Dick into the Copia Reader.

The “thing” that really separates LibraryThing from other book oriented social networks is the emphasis it has put on the grouping of different book editions. (Full disclosure- one of my acheivements at OCLC was managing the productization of OCLC’s book-grouping web service, xISBN, which competes with a similar service from LibraryThing). Similarly, Mendeley expends a huge computational effort determining which article instantiations are the same as other article instantiations in its network.

Retailers naturally work at the product level, and the current version of Copia exposes the weaknesses of using product data as the basis of a social network. They’ll eventually clean this up (as has Amazon) but it will be a slow and difficult process for them to re-engineer their backbone to address the complexities that libraries have long needed to deal with.

Mongoliad, though I’m sure it will cause the ISBN agency all sorts of headaches, is crystal clear about its status as a single, sprawling work. It will be interesting to watch its development as users begin to interact around the objects inside the work- characters, maps, places, etc, each of which is associated with a “‘pedia” page.

Via Eric Hellman’s Go To Hellman blog