Dreaming of a free NetFlix for books site for student readers

12th July 2008

Dreaming of a free NetFlix for books site for student readers

posted in books, literacy, socialnetworking, web 2.0 |

I’ve long been an dormant contributor to “The Infinite Thinking Machine,” Google’s education blog, but my long sleep came to an end today with my new post “A Quest for NetFlix Plus Functionality for Books – for Young Readers!”

I’d love to hear/read your responses, particularly if you’ve used the sites I mention or others like Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing with your own students or children.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 6:52 pm and is filed under books, literacy, socialnetworking, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

1 On July 12th, 2008, annemareemoore said:

I think this is a fabulous idea. If you need some help testing it I will volunteer my school. WOW. I get where you are coming from being a reader myself and my daughter being an avid reader. I looked at Goodreads and it would be great if there was a site dedicated just to children. Go for it.

2 On July 12th, 2008, Tim said:

Hi. I run LibraryThing. I believe that all three sites you mention forbid under-13s entirely from their site, as do Bookmooch, Paperback Swap and others. COOPA is no joke. Perhaps someone will make a “Club Penguin” for books. But complying with COPPA is not trivial, and these aren’t business models with lots of gold sloshing around.

3 On July 13th, 2008, Bill Fitzgerald said:

Hello, Wes,

I just wrote up a quick blueprint on how to build this site using Drupal. Given the existing codebase within Drupal, most of these pieces are already in place. The content recommendation and COPPA compliance would need a little work, but the site you describe could be assembled using open source tools, and therefore be made freely available to anyone who wanted to use it.

The details are at http://funnymonkey.com/site-for-young-readers

Cheers,

Bill

4 On July 14th, 2008, Matt said:

I really like the idea of a NetFlix-type site where kids can access information about books and interact with others regarding book information and preferences. I really never put much thought into this subject; thanks for opening my eyes to this.