Five Things I’d Do If I Were Amazon

1. Tie the Kindle to Facebook. Let me share my reading list with the world, let people buy my recommendations and let me get affiliate payments for it. Also, where my friends and I overlap in books, give me the ability to see their notes and highlights and let them see mine. Additionally, let me loan books to friends via Facebook, rather than dicking around in the Kindle management interface.

2. Create the ability to see ALL notes tied to a page of a book, and make it searchable (but anonymous). Expand the scope of human knowledge.

3. Install a metrics package. See where people abandon books, see where they linger, see where they highlight the most. Share this data with authors and publishers so that they can figure out what works and what doesn’t. (This is probably already done.)

4. Allow the user to link a note to another book title altogether. For example, if I want to note in The Diamond Age that the old lady who says “chiseled spam” is likely Y.T. from Snow Crash, I should be able to link directly to that title.

5. The ability to copy text. It sure would be nice to be able to easily extract quotes from books. I understand that part of it is not wanting to allow people to copy books wholesale…maybe limit it a selection size of 100 words, or something similar? This is a huge roadblock in Kindle use.

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