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Is there a Book → Book Club / Reading Group service? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by chkno@lemmy.ml to c/books@lemmy.ml
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I have a specific book I've been meaning to read for awhile. I've heard that while it's a great journey, it's a dense / heavy / slow read along the way. It sounds like it'd be fun to read it together with a group of likewise interested folks.

Is there a service for pulling together reading groups around specific books, rather than the more common way of gathering a group of people and then selecting books? I'm imagining a website that has a sign-up page for ~every book and when ~10 people sign up for a book they all get an email introducing them to each other. Like if there was a bus stop for every book & when enough people had gathered, a bus appears & they depart together.

Given list of all the books, this seems like a pretty easy thing to make. Does it exist yet?

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[-] alex@jlai.lu 7 points 1 year ago

I believe The Storygraph is working on creating something relatively similar on the longer term. Currently they have « buddy reads » - I've never used them but from what I understand you can sign up for a buddy read on a book and get matched with someone else?

[-] chkno@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the lead!

It looks like the Buddy Read feature does in fact start with a specific book and organize a group around it, but it invites me to specify all the people that will ever be in the group right away, at group creation time. I get three ways to invite people:

  • "Machine-learning powered reading buddy recommendations" - Unspecified voodoo. Three users are shown.
  • "Community members who have this book on their radar" - Probably folks that have this on their public 'to read' list. Three users are shown.
  • Specifying users directly by username

This doesn't quite fit the "I'm up for this, let me know when it starts" mechanic.

I could create a new group & invite all three of the users with this book in their public 'to read' list, but I think folks treat the the 'to read' list very, very casually -- not at the "I'm ready to commit to a reading group" level. These three users have 723, 2749, and 3771 books on their 'to read' lists respectively. I see that I somehow have have 46 books on mine, & haven't been thinking of it as a 'ready to commit to reading group' list.

[-] alex@jlai.lu 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the detailed test! I thought it would be an option for people who already opted in and not just having the book on their to-read :(

this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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