Regardless, what's of most interest to me is how Amazon is actively trialing a social reading service connected to the Kindle brand. While Amazon owns the social reading service Shelfari, which it acquired three years ago, it hasn't integrated Shelfari in a deep way into Kindle. In this post, we review the features of Kindle Profiles and ask whether you'd want to use this over competing services like Goodreads or Library Thing.

Kindle Profiles comes in both private and public flavors. The private one, as you'd expect, has much more in it. But as Facebook has done over the past couple of years with its initially private service, over time Amazon will likely prompt and tease you to make your private content public.

Kindle Profiles isn't even the official name for this service. In its inimitably clumsy branding way, Amazon calls it "Kindle.amazon.com." The service aims to augment the reading experience by "bringing readers together and by helping them to learn more from the books that they read." In other words: it's social. You can follow people "to see their Public Notes and reading activities, and review your books, highlights, and notes."

The private profile lists out your Kindle booklist, which it gets from your Amazon profile (both purchased books and ones on your Wish List). Each book has a reading status and rating, which is populated from your Amazon profile if available.

How Your Kindle Profile Differs From Your Amazon Profile

At a high level, your Kindle Profile is focused on reading and your Amazon profile is focused on buying. Specifically, there are two main differences between your Kindle Profile and your Amazon Profile.

Firstly, Kindle Profile makes available your Kindle highlights and notes. Highlights are passages in a book that you literally highlight for later viewing. Notes are your own custom notations inside a book, much like scribbling in the margins of a paper book. Both highlights and notes are private by default, but you can make them public on a book-by-book basis.

Secondly, you can connect your Kindle Profile to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. As noted above, this causes the system to auto-follow users in your social networks who have a Kindle Profile, too. You can also manually follow users - here is my public profile if you're interested.

There is an option to auto-share your reading activity to Twitter or Facebook. Again the default is private, but Amazon puts the public option front and center. This only applies to the status of a public book, so it doesn't apply to books marked private or to Kindle highlights and notes.

Your private Kindle Profile comes in a handy 'homepage' like package, offering features such as a "Daily Review" (selected highlights from your reading), recent activity, popular highlights, stats and "highly followed people" (featuring the usual social media suspects, e.g. Kevin Rose and Seth Godin).

Will You Use Kindle Profiles?

One issue I had when playing with my Kindle Profile was that much of my data was out-of-date. Goodreads is my social reading service of choice and there is significantly more of my reading data in Goodreads than on my Amazon profile. There appears to be no way to sync the two. Since I don't feel inclined to keep two separate social reading services up-to-date, it's likely that I'll stick with Goodreads - since I enjoy that community and I have over three years worth of reading data there.

Overall, it's great to see Amazon making Kindle profiles social. Granted, it's far from perfect. The interface is a bit confusing, especially the different private and public profiles. There is also a lot more social connectivity that Amazon could enable, for example allowing you to send highlights automatically from your Kindle to Twitter, Facebook or even Google Plus.

However, the interface and additional social features will evolve over time. This is a good start by Amazon. Now the big question is: will you use it? As noted above, I'm inclined to stick with Goodreads for now. You?

"When the user mouses over a book, a contextual popup comes up containing information about the book and a set of associated actions. Part of the popup is a button/menu (sort of like a button and combo box) widget that allows the user to provide information about what he or she did with the book. The first thing to note is that combination of a button in a menu is not standard, yet it makes sense because it saves a click for the most important action. Secondly, the menu is effectively a popup within a popup, which is a big no-no in the classic world, but works well in this context. The elements of the menu are not buttons but check boxes, which allow multiple selection - another violation of classic user interface elements, but which works very well in this context. What is remarkable is how intuitive this gadget is - you are interacting with it in the context of a book and each choice is simple and clear.

Such clarity and simplicity was never present in the old interfaces. Clearly, this new approach to UIs is great, and early adopters are loving it. But will it cross over to the mainstream?"

To answer Alex's question, in a way it already has crossed over to the mainstream - as Borders implemented a very similar design near the end of May. But in general whether Shelfari goes mainstream will depend on how Amazon integrates it with its core business and with products such as the e-Reader Kindle.

Also it's worth noting that Amazon has been busy lately with book-related acquisitions. Earlier this month Amazon announced its acquisition of AbeBooks, an online marketplace for used and rare books. Interestingly AbeBooks owns 40% of LibraryThing!

LibraryThing is clearly worried about today's acquisition. In the above-linked piece, founder and lead developer of LibraryThing Tim Spalding notes that "Amazon can make Shelfari the choice of casual book-lovers who see a button on Amazon.com and click on it." LibraryThing hopes to compete with this by being a superior service. However it's very difficult to compete against Amazon's bulk.

Good luck to LibraryThing, we all love a feisty competitor. For now, tell us in the comments what you think Amazon will do with Shelfari now that it owns it outright.