Reading Room - Social Media website

The Reading Room, a social media website for book lovers, will be launched at the Sydney Writers' Festival 2009 to compete with Facebook and Amazon.

Lara Sinclair | May 18, 2009

FORMER Southern Cross Broadcasting and Nine Network executive Kim Anderson has teamed up with internet entrepreneur Luke Carruthers to launch a social media venture that takes on two of the giants of the digital world.

On Wednesday, The Reading Room -- a social media website for book lovers -- will go into public testing, coinciding with a promotional campaign to launch the site at the Sydney Writers' Festival.

The site will compete with social media behemoth Facebook for friend referrals and recommendations among readers, and with global e-tailer Amazon for sales, but with a single-minded focus on avid readers.

"We're creating a community for readers to live on and share books with each other and share their thoughts about reading," Ms Anderson said.

The site is designed around a virtual "bookshelf", on which members can put books selected from a comprehensive global database containing 4 million different titles and editions, covering a wide variety of genres from fiction to academic texts.

They can then rate, recommend and share their views on books, as well as form and join virtual book groups to discuss them.

While members will not at this stage be able to read books on the site, they will be able to buy books.

"You can rate a book," Ms Anderson said. "You can make those books available to be viewed by other users.

"You can also buy books."

Mr Carruthers, who has previously started technology firms including Magna Data and InterTouch, said the social nature of the site was key.

"The whole idea of users and members talking to each other is what the site is about," he said.

Ms Anderson said it was important that The Reading Room, which she jointly owns with Mr Carruthers, remained independent but had links to the world's key publishers.

She said rival social networking sites for readers were generally linked with a particular publisher, a factor that led members to question the independence of book recommendations and reviews.

Once The Reading Room is established in Australia, the pair intend to launch it in the US -- hence a global web domain, www.thereadingroom.com.

The plan is to make money from online advertising, mainly from publishers promoting new titles, as well as by charging a commission on book sales.

There is also the potential to conduct market research among readers once the site reaches critical mass.

Media company Full Circle is in talks to represent the site for advertising sales.

The founders are hoping more than 250,000 members will join up in the site's initial phase.