21st century publishing part I, reprise of thoughts on an IMDB for books

My last post garnered some attention but only for one portion of it, that's what you get for running on too long. A lot of people seemed to like the idea of an IMDB for books, or rather an IBDB. But I actually concur with one commenter who remarked that Amazon largely have this covered. Amazon may not be infallible, but it is such a handy and readily available repository of data that it is not unheard of for publishers and agents in the industry to check it for information on their own titles and authors.

Out of curiosity I decided to see if there was an IMDB history to see how they got to be the "it place" for movie and tv information but not finding one on the actual site I headed over to good old wikipedia. There's a detailed history there of typical company growth issues and success through sheer persistence. Presuming all the facts to be true, IMDB is now 18 years old, and 10 of those years it was owned, and thus funded, by Amazon.

There are already a number of data/review sites for books out in the wild struggling for their communities but IMDB has two things going for it that Shelfari, LibraryThing, Open Library, Goodreads, and others I may have missed: 1) time to build and 2) the all powerful force of one of the major internet players...Oh wait a minute, one of them does: Shelfari.

Now if Amazon can get my purchases to merge with my Shelfari shelf then that could be a checkmate move. This is not to suggest that the internet isn't big enough for more than one, just that Amazon is ahed of the pack and has an army of sellers constantly feeding its database and reviews.

I'd be curious to know what people use these things for? Are people really talking with other readers? Forming interest groups around books and micro-genres? I've spent about 20 minutes setting up a shelf on shelfari and LibraryThing and so on then never looked at them again...