Bookweave

You may have noticed a strange link appearing on my book review posts recently, entitled ”Explore at Bookweave”. Bookweave is a site where you can see the connections between books—you can look at what books a given book mentions or cites as a reference and you can see what books reference the given book. I like to call it social networking for books. It works best for non-fiction books for obvious reasons).

The site is built manually, and it pulls data about the books from Amazon. As I’m reading a book, I’ll keep track of what other books are mentioned. I can then go to the site and search for the book I’m reading. I then use the “Add Mention…” link to connect the book I’m reading to the books it mentions. Pretty straightforward, really.

So why would this be useful? Well, I’m one of those people (perhaps the only one?) who actually reads the bibliography and/or the further reading section to get ideas for what I should read next. I thought it would be neat to build a website around that idea, and to see what connections between different books might exist. As an example, you can already see the influence of Good to Great beginning to emerge even with the small amount of data on the site, as it’s mentioned in three other books.

I’m supporting the site via Amazon associate links, so if you click through to Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, I’ll get a small cut of any purchases you happen to make.

Take a look – you never know what you might find!