Social network site for lovers of literature

Literature lovers have a new place to show off their libraries, mingle with authors and buy bargain books. Monday sees the public launch of Bookrabbit.com, a website aiming to take on Amazon, Borders and Waterstones by bringing the personal touch back to book selling.
While other online bookshops allow users to post reviews and comments, Bookrabbit claims to be the first site to put social networking at its heart. Users can post photos of their bookshelves, view videos by hundreds of authors and meet like-minded readers.Charles Denton, the retail entrepreneur behind the site, says Bookrabbit helps readers find books they would never otherwise had heard of – driven not by computer algorithms but personal recommendations.
“With Amazon there is no soul,” he says. “It’s an efficient book-buying service but it has no community feel.”
Bookrabbit was born out of a bricks-and-mortar book chain. Mr Denton bought a majority stake in Aim-traded Samedaybooks in May 2007, and as deputy chairman has closed down four of the six local bookstores the company ran in south-east England, reinventing the group – subsequently renamed ArgentVive – as a “niche e-commerce” company.
Mr Denton was chief executive of Molton Brown, a cosmetics producer, when it became the first luxury cosmetics retailer to launch an e-commerce site. In 2005, he helped sell the cosmetic group to Kao Corporation of Japan for £170m.
Now he is seeking board permission to take ArgentVive, owner of Bookrabbit, private and also plans to launch a niche rival to Ebay, the online auction site, later this year. But the company is expected to post a seven-figure loss when it publishes annual results next month, because of the effect of four acquisitions and the bookstores closures.
The remaining stores will be kept open to retain some personal contact with customers. “Trading online is dangerous if you’re not interacting face-to-face with people,” says Mr Denton.
Word-of-mouth recommendations are one of the most important forms of marketing for booksellers – a natural fit for social networking sites such as Bookrabbit and more established peers such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.
Sites such as Shelfari, Librarything and Goodreads have already attempted Bookrabbit’s combination of bookselling and socialising in the US, most linking to Amazon for book sales. Bookcrossing.com enables readers to share books with strangers by leaving them in public and tagging their location on the site. Last year Penguin, the book publisher owned by Pearson, parent company of the Financial Times, created Spinebreakers, an interactive community for book-loving teenagers.
Anna Rafferty, Penguin’s digital marketing director, says Spinebreakers allows its tens of thousands of members to post alternative cover designs, alternative endings or self-written soundtracks. “We know who our existing readers are – we want to find them in a new place.”
Random House, the book publisher, recently launched a web “widget” allowing bloggers and Bookrabbit users to share book extracts.