Hi all,

I've been musing on software tools that might be useful for book clubs.

I'm not necessarily looking for a turnkey solution explicitly geared
towards book clubs, but more a thought experiment of what tools might be
useful for an ongoing "in the real world" book club.

Some needs that software tools might help keep track of:

* A way to vote for what books to read next
* Schedule of times
* An estimator calculator (reading level of book + length of book,
estimated sessions).
* way to add notes or linked materials
* online discussions to supplement in person meetings
* glossary/dictionary functionality perhaps?

In my own thoughts some of the online services like GoodReads, Shelfari and
LibraryThing seems to at least offer some tools and information. A system
that I haven't had a chance to explore enough, Loomis, might help with the
decision making parts.


Part of the impetus for this is I've recently joined a technical book club.
At the moment we're using a wiki, which is working fine, but in particular
the voting is clunky.  I could picture something where members can add/link
to something like librarything in a list and the book with the most votes
(w/ ties being broken randomly) is the next book in the queue.

So anyone out there already doing something similar? Thoughts? Ideas?

Jon Gorman
University of Illinois