Community building at Borders – online book clubs
Urban Lindstedt writes about Borders book club, and community building at the book store chain. They collaborate with gather.com, a topics based community service where participants rate others’ contributions and earn points from writing popular posts or inviting more people.
Like Lindstedt writes, the content of the book club is rather limited. So far it has 129 members, which is even less than I have on my slumbering mailing list on creative writing in Swedish, but I guess it’s at an early stage.
What I like about it is that Borders set out to facilitate discussions around the books they sell, and you can reserve the upcoming book club books online and get 20 percent off at your local Borders book store. Each month four new books are presented, and at the Gather book club community the author of each book writes a piece about it, which the members can comment on and discuss with him or her. There are also reading guides available for the books.
Book club visitors are also encouraged to start their own book clubs – either on Gather for online discussions, or in real life – where they can discuss books of their own choosing.
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