SharedBook Rocks

If you haven't heard of SharedBook you should visit their site and see what they have to offer.  I mentioned their Blog2Print service in this post last month.  Yesterday they announced a new deal with Random House which will enable customers to create a personalized version of The Poky Little Puppy, one of the bestselling children's books of all time.  I somehow missed this SharedBook/FanBook announcement from last month; they've created another service for sports fans to create customized books of their own.  It's limited to a small number of schools for now, but imagine how big this could be when they expand it in the future.  (They recently added Ohio State, so all those Buckeye fans can now go out and create customized books of the various national championship games they've lost over the past couple of years!)

SharedBook refers to it as their "Reverse Publishing Platform."  The Random House deal is a book customization program.  FanBook is a huge step beyond that and is really a mashup tool that lets you create your own book from a variety of content sources.  Think about what this model might look like in the future if every type of magazine, newspaper, book, online and offline content source was available through it...  I think their tagline says it all: "Made Any Good Books Lately?"

Very cool.  Be sure to check out SharedBook's blog as well.