ReThink Books Creates SocialBooks: Share Your Reading!

The technological socialization of reading books is here. SocialBooks is making it possible for publishers to publish their books as apps for iPad.

With “SocialBooks,” created by ReThink Books, you can now share what you’re reading more than ever. The soon-to-be-released iPad app will allow you to share specific excerpts from the book you are reading with your friends, discuss that excerpt, and even post media like videos and pictures to further explore the excerpt.

SocialBooks not only connects your friends with what you are reading, but it also gives them a chance to buy what you are reading. With SocialBooks, you can view your friends’ iPad bookshelf and then purchase the books directly from it. SocialBook’s direct connections with Facebook and Twitter will definitely help its growth possibilites.

The new SocialBooks app will hopefully go a long way in inspiring a younger generation, obsessed with social media, technology and media entertainment, to learn why people love to read. It’s cool that there are devices like the Nook and the Kindle, as well as the iPad’s reader, but SocialBooks will do more to incline young tech-savvy socialites to just sit back and read.

Say you are reading a book about criminology (I’m obsessed with Criminal Minds at the moment, so please bear with the constant references to criminal profiling in past and upcoming articles – and if you haven’t seen it, you have to!). In the past, you could share the title of the book on Facebook, as well as the things you’ve learned about psychological profiling. But with SocialBooks, you can highlight a passage and directly share it with your friends on Facebook. The best part is that you can also add media, like videos and pictures, to certain passages and books. This way, your friends might be more easily inspired to start reading about criminology.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch makes a really good point – books are already a social activity. Most people end up reading books that friends and family have suggested, or they suggest the good books they have read to their family and friends. With SocialBooks, this process becomes much faster, and much more interesting.

SocialBooks, along with e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook, could go a long way in maintaining the passion to read, and teaching younger generations the value of it. What do you think?