Describing itself as “part online bookstore, part social network,” and “the world’s first truly social e-reading platform,” Copia has launched a platform designed to bring together book-buying, reading and discussion.
While there are several sites, such as Goodreads that let you share your reading lists, habits, and reviews with others, Copia wants to bring that sharing and collaboration within the e-book itself so that book discussions can be held in real-time, right from the pages of the text.
Like other book-sharing sites, Copia encourages you to create a library of every book you’ve ever read and allows you to rate and review books. Content on the site – the books and user-generated notes – can be browsed by community rating, tags from users or publishers, notations, popularity and price.
The social element the site wants to promote includes links to Facebook and Twitter, as well as the ability to form study groups and book clubs. But it’s the note-sharing from within the pages of a book that may be Copia’s most interesting feature and the one that serves most clearly to break from the idea that reading is a solitary and isolated event.
We recently looked at e-readers and e-books as one of the “Top Trends of 2010,” noting that features like social highlighting may make digital books better than printed versions.
Copia is currently available as a desktop and an iPad app, with access on additional mobile devices coming soon.
