Amazon Kindle Goes Social, with Facebook and Twitter Support

Book worms really are getting social. A new update to the second-generation Kindle and Kindle DX support Facebook and Twitter, enabling you to share book passages directly from the ebook. This is a first for Kindle’s ebook reader, and it takes yet another jab at the quickly growing ebook market. As Amazon fights to maintain a prominent position in the ebook industry, determining how it will go social and what it will do once it gets there could be a promising move for the online retailer.

The update for Amazon’s Kindle comes days after Barnes & Noble announced updates to its own ebook reader. While the B&N Nook had updates that brought it up to par with the Kindle, it’s encroaching all the same. Throw the Apple iPad into the mix and you’ve got quite a flurry of burgeoning ebook readers for consumers to select from. Choices are good things, particularly when it comes to consumer electronics. But going social with reading behavior is a new realm for each of these companies to explore.

With Amazon going social, book passage-sharing is somewhat aligned with other social networking options the company has added to its affiliate programs and the like. Making it easier to post this type of consumer behavior to one’s social graph is an indirect means of marketing while promoting a particular sense around the use of a sharing mechanism in order to collect such information on a given user.

In terms of recommendations, that would seem to be the natural progression for Amazon, particularly given its multi-pronged approach to making its consumer activity optionally social. Things like Facebook Like imports could easily be incorporated into Amazon’s social goals, with advertising options just beyond that horizon.

For Apple, such social integration may be largely avoided to this end–the company hasn’t focused much of its efforts on the socialization of its mobile presence. iTunes is still an individually-driven search tool, iPhone apps aren’t as well integrated into virtual social structures, and the recommendation system around book reading behavior is not something Apple is likely to put a great deal of resources towards, especially as its ebook reader is supported by its own ecosystem, which runs on its own platform.

We’re more likely to see a similar social move from B&N in the near-term, especially as the ability to create an access point and collect data across various devices and platforms is the way in which others can compete with Apple’s monochromatic approach. They both serve their own purposes, and have entirely different goals to consider.

As more and more consumer behavior is openly shared across social networks, we’ll see more personalized tools arise from large companies that have a broad reach and multiple access points. It’s a method of infiltration that isn’t new, but is currently being implemented in a new (possibly constructive) way. Other feature upgrades to the Amazon Kindle include popular highlights, which enhances the social features for Kindle community members, and improved organization options of your library.