Amazon Kindle vs Seth Godin vs Copia vs Mythical Apple Tablet

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Today I was re-watching Seth Godin’s wonderful talk at the Ted conference “Tribes are what mater now“. I would highly recommend Godin’s clarion call for leadership but what caught my eye was at 10 minutes 30 seconds into the presentation he held up my favorite eBook reader the Amazon Kindle. Godin then said that Amazon missed the boat by not building in a social capability into this machine. Why can’t you see the notes from other people who are reading the same book? Why can’t you have a book discussion or join an online book club? Those are good questions.

Godin’s presentation was made last May and at least one company has listened. At CES the Copia was introduced:

First, the platform. Copia is a social networking platform that lets you set up a profile, rate and buy books, and share recommendations with your friends. You can also form and join discussion groups, both public and private, and gives you personalized recommendations based on what your friends have been reading. It has a web presence at thecopia.com, but will also be a platform hosted by various hardware partners to be named later. via gizmodo

As the tech world holds its breath to see what Apple is releasing next week it will be interesting to see if Apple was also listening. My guess is that they were not. For a company that is in the forefront on the internet it has been surprisingly behind on any sort of social media solution (other than app and podcast reviews). This is particularly ironic to me since I worked at Apple back in 1996 and Apple had a prototype of their eWorld community running on open internet platforms. They could not afford that effort at that time and Mr Jobs does not seem to be a big fan of social products as far as I can tell from Apple’s priorities since that date. If next week’s announcement really is an Apple tablet (rather than the Mighty Mouse ][ as I am predicting ) then this could be an ideal opportunity for Apple to get back into the social game.