Announcing Badges for Books from Altmetric: New Technology Opening up Reading as a Social and Sharable Experience

Badges for Books offers insights for authors, editors and readers, providing an at-a-glance summary of the attention and conversations surrounding published books and individual chapters.

Originally, developed for use within scholarly books, the technology works with a book’s ISBN and DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) at the chapter level. It provides a collated and real-time record of mentions from a wide range of online sources, including the mainstream media, blogs, social media, public policy documents, online reference managers, Wikipedia and post-publication peer review platforms.

These colourful visualisations will offer insight into how people are responding to new titles, and help readers, publishers and authors to identify which chapters are generating the most attention online.

The technology has real implications for the way in which we currently share, understand and evaluate literature. For the first time readers will have the opportunity to easily access an extensive and immediate summary of the shares and discussion relating to a particular title or chapter. They’ll be able to see how their opinions with a book align with broader public reactions, and even engage in discussion and debate on a global scale.

Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric says:

“Social commentary and public opinion are now firmly ensconced in our online world. Yet many of these interactions, even where they relate to something specific like a particular book, remain dispersed and time-consuming to identify. We see the release of Badges for Books as a great opportunity to apply our technology to enable reading to be a more interactive and social experience, not just in the academic sphere, but increasingly in everyday life as well. Imagine a world where you can not only share your immediate reactions from reading, but understand how they resonate within a wider conversation. It’s fascinating.”

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