I’m very glad to see how this conversation (initiated with the post about All Consuming below) is starting to grow. Since my post yesterday there’s been another post from Jill, a post from Torill, then another post from Torill.

However, the conversation I hoped to start was not about who is lucky enough to live somewhere with a good, independent bookstore. I think the important issue here is link politics.

Specifically, I think:

• We should choose where to link based on our values. As I described at the end of my post yesterday, this may lead to all of us linking different places for different reasons (and would be unlikely to lead to us all linking one place - Amazon or anywhere - by default).
• We should work toward aggregation efforts that support this heterogeneity of linking. Jill points out rightly that this will require some common identifier, which for books is the ISBN. As Erik Benson (who created All Consuming) pointed out when I was emailing with him, both Amazon and Booksense use the ISBN in book URLs (even if Amazon calls it the ASIN, and then extends the system for non-book items) so this should be easy for book-oriented sites. That is to say, the problem isn’t primarily technical.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 15th, 2002 at 7:07 am and is filed under old-hyperfiction-blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.