SharedBook Announces Several New Initiatives

Many readers will know I have been a fan of the SharedBook model for several years now and enjoy keeping track of their new initiatives. Here is a recent update on several new announcements from the company:

Today, Congressman John Culberson http://culberson.house.gov (R-Texas) placed a link on his site that allows his constituents to read and comment on the House Healthcare Bill, using SharedBook’s annotation platform. In the Congressman’s words, “this new website will give you, my constituents in the Seventh District, a choice in the health care debate. You now have an opportunity to read and comment on the bill. I look forward to reading your comments and restoring public trust in the government by raising the level of openness, order and discourse.” We applaud the Congressman for taking Transparency to a new level by allowing his constituents to give him feedback on healthcare reform in a very granular and detailed way.

Meanwhile, Google has informally announced on its blog that they now have an affiliation with SharedBook’s Blog2Print product, to enable users of the Blogger platform to easily translate their blog into a physical book or PDF download. Since Blog2Print was introduced in July of ‘07 ago, tens of thousands of bloggers have created a permanent record of their posts and photos. See http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/09/turn-your-blog-into-book-with.html.

On September 14th, Hachette, through its Twelve Books imprint, with authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, launched three chapters of their best seller “NurtureShock” into the SharedBook annotation platform, to allow readers to discuss their controversial findings on child rearing. The New York Times and others covered this experiment in social media as applied to published works and we are excited to watch the discussion progress. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/business/media/07book.html?_r=1)

And Woman’s Day is using SharedBook’s Smart Button to allow consumers of their web content to create their own cookbooks <http://www.womansday.com/shared_book.html> from Woman’s Day recipes. With a couple of clicks, users can compile a cookbook of their choice, add more personal content to it if they so desire, and save it to their hard drive or create a hard or soft bound copy.

Finally, we’ve added another 50 titles from assorted publishers to www.Inscribe-it.com and are looking forward to the Holiday season, when we are told that some major magazines and media outlets will choose these personalized books as a featured Holiday gift item. A home page redesign will be launched to usher in the 4th quarter.

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