An Overview of Book Blogs

The excellent Virginia Postrel's blog, Dynamist.com, is in my RSS feed. She recently posted a blog that shared her recent reading list, which got me wondering why the blog technology hasn't been harnessed for a book blogging website? Not a site where someone like Postrel blogs on her current reading, but a site that enables EVERYONE to blog on their current reading.

It seems like a no-brainer. Where's Amazon on this?

In my ideal world, I would have an RSS feed from every friend -- so that I would know what they are reading! They wouldn't have to write and tell me. It would just show up on my RSS feeds, right? I have yet to hear from a single friend who has discovered a site/technology like this, so I am exploring the possibility of innovating it by myself. Here's my take on what the bookblog entry form might look like.

So that has me thinking ... and here is what I've discovered so far:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0907/p15s01-bogn.html is a nice summary article of the impact of individual book bloggers, vis-a-vis the publishing industry.

http://www.triangle.com/books/zane/story/2118926p-8499194c.html is a nice commentary by Peter Zane, with links to some great individual book blogs.

So, if I were to start up a new website the enabled people to have a free book blog of their own, even easier to use than blogger, what do you think we should call it? I found these domain names available:

laymanslibrary.com
library247.com
bookfeeder.com
constantbook.com
bookshelfish.com