Who Will Own the eBook Want-to-Read Graph?

It could be Readmill. On the ebook reader app’s most overlooked feature.

The ebook reader app Readmill doesn’t make a fuss about “mark as interesting,” the feature that lets readers mark a book as worth checking out later.

You won’t see it mentioned in the list of features on Readmill’s website, and the page where the saved books are displayed — called, simply, Interesting — isn’t easy to find. It is two clicks deep in the browser version of Readmill, and completely absent from the Readmill for Android app.

Despite this, “mark as interesting” has become one of my favourite Readmill features. It has slowly replaced the Google Doc where I list the books I intend to pick up, and when I see something I want to check out later, I find myself searching for that book on Readmill, so that I can save it.

“Mark as interesting” is easy-to-overlook, but I suspect that there’s a lot of potential in that seemingly inconsequential gesture.

What “Mark as Interesting” Could Be

Imagine that in addition to reading books and highlighting/sharing passages, “mark as interesting” was one of Readmill’s major use cases.

What could Readmill do if it knew every book you were interested in reading?

Here’re four scenarios from that universe:

It’s Monday morning. A Readmill publisher representative is finishing up an email to her contact at Penguin UK:

“Hi Mark — over 2,000 people in Ghana added a Zadie Smith book to their “want to read” pile over the weekend. Did you know Zadie had such a following there? Might be worth adding that country to her international book tour.

This might also be a good time to give a 25% in-app discount on Zadie Smith books to Readmillers in that area. That would help get your books on top of their reading pile.”

Uyen’s birthday is in a week. She posts a link to her Readmill Interesting page on Facebook, with the caption:

“I’m just going to put it out there that my birthday is in 7 days, and I’ve had my eye on these books for a while… ;)”

There is a buy button next to each book on the page. Within 48 hours, Uyen’s friends have given her the best possible birthday gift — a massive expansion to her library.

You get an email from Lisa Sanchez, Readmill’s Community Manager.

“Hi there! Just wanted to give you a heads up that Rebecca Solnit, author of The Faraway Nearby, will be chatting about the book and commenting on highlights inside Readmill for the next month.

I saw that you’ve marked that book as interesting. This might be a good time to start reading and jump into the conversation?

Best wishes, and see you in the margins!”

It’s Friday evening after a long, frustrating week.

As you pass by a bookseller, the iBeacon on the bookshelf pings you via the Readmill app:

“This bookstore has A Game of Thrones on sale! Get it for 10% off.”

You’ve heard good things about A Game of Thrones. You also like the idea of a quiet night in, curled up with a heavy novel, a comfy blanket, and a large mug of hot chocolate with a dash of citrus vodka. Yeah, you deserve to treat yourself once in a while.

You enter the bookstore.

Getting There

Here’re four things that could help make the above scenarios possible:

• A more comprehensive Readmill book database: I’ve sometimes gone in search of a book inside Readmill to mark as interesting, only to realize that Readmill didn’t yet have an entry for that book
• Better URL for the Interesting page: Currently, the URL for the Interesting page defaults to readmill.com/you/interesting. Instead, it should be readmill.com/[Readmill username]/interesting (so in my case, readmill.com/quartey/interesting). Why? The former syntax links directly to the Interesting page of the person who enters the URL, instead of the page of a particular person. This imposes friction on sharing that link with people. It took me a second to figure out that I could swap out “you” for my username, but that solution might not be as obvious to other people.
• Make it possible to buy books right from Readmill: Easier said than done! Readmill currently has a “Get this Book” button on the website that searches Kobo, but the search doesn’t always return a positive result. Hopefully, with time, Readmill will be able to convince even more publishers of the clear benefit of dramatically reducing the distance between marking a book as interesting inside Readmill, and paying for it.
• Make it possible to access my Interesting section from the app: Related to the previous point, since this would only really be useful if I could go ahead and immediately get the book.

On Desire Graphs

(The next few paragraphs are very speculative. I’m still working through these ideas, and I’d appreciate feedback.)

If you’ve spent any time reading about technology startups, you’ve likely heard the expressions “social graph” and “interest graph.”

Google defines a social graph as “a representation of the interconnection of relationships in an online social network.” Facebook is an example of a company that is built on mining your relationships with people.

Via Wikipedia, an interest graph is “an online representation of the specific things in which an individual is interested.” Twitter is often used as an example of a company with an interest in understanding the topics and ideas you’re curious about.

The expression “desire graph” appropriates something from the aforementioned ideas. It’s a representation of intention and aspiration.

Is there any value in a graph of desire? I suspect so. I believe there’s value in knowing the stories that people would like to tell about themselves.

Just as some companies grew large by mining the hard edges of your existing relationships, there’re some who’re trying to build a business on knowing your mercurial wants. The read-it-later app Pocket comes to mind. Pocket learns a lot from the articles you read, but it also learns a lot from the articles in your queue that you haven’t yet read. Likewise, Letterboxed creates “want-to-watch” graphs of movies by allowing you to index films you would like to see. And arguably, one of the most successful companies built on a desire graph is Chris Dixon’s Hunch, which sold to eBay in 2011. Hunch built software that analyzed tons of datapoints to predict people’s affinity for anything. These predictions were powered by what Hunch called its Taste Graph.

I’m rambling.

The point is that I really do believe that there is value in understanding people’s desire graphs, in whatever form, including want-to-read graphs. At the very least, these graphs reveal purchase intent, which is data that publishers would be interested in.

The giant elephant in the room, of course, is Amazon, which owns a competing eBook reader application in Kindle, as well as a thriving community around its Wishlist feature.

Still, I wouldn’t count Readmill out of the running. Their laser focus on phenomenal design is evident in the app’s excellent user experience. It was Readmill that finally made eBooks work for me, and like many other Readmill enthusiasts, I discovered the app by word-of-mouth.

If there’s any team that has a shot at owning the want-to-read graph and actually building something valuable on top of it, its Readmill.