Readmill’s Closing Remarks

a follow up to The Difference Between Amazon and Goodreads Reviews

I wrote a post Sunday night about how Goodreads reviews not working well because the same content is supposed perform multiple jobs across the site, in ways that a normal user might not ever consider. I ended with

Having content that’s torn between serving multiple purposes is effectively the same as having content that serves no purpose. And that’s what you get when you make content that meant to be shared between friends, or at least people with some familiarity with the OP, and a bunch of strangers who just want to find out if they should try out a new book.

But when I go over to one of Readmill’s heavily marked books,say the Steve Jobs bio, I see content that’s pulled in from statuses meant to be shared with friends and nobody is trying to show off or write an English paper. Readmill’s content may exist in multiple places, but it has a consistency of input that Goodreads’ doesn’t have - a reader can’t just write a review for a book by going to its page. Every “Closing Remark” is part of a process of reading and highlighting that each reader shares. When you have shared the passages you like with friends over the course of a book and commented on the material itself, I’d wager the urge to write more than a short wrap up for those friends largely disappears. That process, combined with the power of suggestion that comes from the relatively small composition field and the name “closing remarks” probably makes the 400 character character limit go unnoticed by most readers. I’d never noticed it before I took a close look at the prompt this morning anyway.

It’s a really well designed solution that places minimal restrictions on the user and encourages content that’s palatable across contexts.