Progressive Book Club Launches Today

The NYT covers today's launch of the Progressive Book Club, a venture that hopes to help progressive authors, readers, and thinkers share ideas more efficiently. We built the online community features, which are unique among book clubs, on top of the BSD Online Tools.

Despite the rise of the Internet, there are plenty of people who still find their ideas in an old-fashioned place -- between the covers of a book -- and the PBC aims to become a trusted editorial voice, helping progressive readers find the best new and classic titles in areas like progressive economics, the environment, healthcare, and spirituality. Their big-name editorial panel -- including Michael Chabon, Erica Jong, Barbara Kingsolver, John Podesta, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and Todd Gitlin -- lends credibility to their efforts.

Unlike most other book clubs, which are clubs only in name, the Progressive Book Club has built a deep online community infrastructure into their Web site -- founded on the BSD Online Tools, of course -- so that club members can post user profiles, blog and comment, and actually meet each other through the club. That's a real advantage, we think, and leverages one of the Internet's most powerful aspects -- its ability to connect people with common interests, across social groups and across the miles, so they can have one-to-one interactions in the real world.

So click, join, read ... and share your own ideas! 

• Progressive Book Club
• Motoko Rich, "The New Progressive Book Club Is Geared to Liberals," The New York Times, June 16, 2008 (free nytimes.com registration required)