I’d like Amazon to build a true social network around books and readers. I’ve tried Goodreads, and then later I tried it again. That’s not the answer. The site is a bit of a confusing ghost town, and it seems oriented around finding a book to read, which the Amazon site and other resources already do a good enough job solving.

The reading social network I want is around discussing ideas in the text itself. I want the ability to see the notes and highlights of my friends on books we’ve both purchased, and I want the ability to respond to their notes, or at least to like them. I want them to see my public highlights and notes, and I want them to be able to respond to those.

I would love the ability to follow certain notable folks and see their public notes and highlights.

What if every time a person was mentioned in a book, they’d receive a notification, like a notification that they’d been tagged in a Facebook photo? At a basic level, we’d have a lot more crowd-sourcing of fact-checking, but at a higher level the book becomes an opening to a dialogue.

now authors would be constantly revisiting their own books to participate in a dialogue with their readers. Books would go from two dimensional to having a z-axis composed of an infinite number of onion paper layers available to scribble on.

Such a platform transforms the purchase of a book into the beginning of a lifelong relationship and dialogue around its ideas. A copyrighted text become not just paywalled content, a locked fortress, but an open platform for contextual conversation. Over time, each book would become richer and richer, a living tome.

I envision that my home feed could include highlights and notes from other readers I was following, and again, if I didn’t own the book they were referencing I’d see a truncated excerpt with a buy button to unlock the whole text.