Mills and Boon, the romance fiction publishing house based in the United Kingdom has plans to create an interest-based Facebook-like community. Taken by many observers to be a sign of the times, this may be one of a growing number of instances when a renowned paper book publisher takes to online media with such enthusiasm.
Launching on the 6th of April, the social platform will feature blogs, member profiles and messaging capabilities. Social networks seem to be all the rage as businesses inspired by the success of massive online communities such as MySpace and Facebook seek to replicate the social collaboration model to suit their own ends.
With many portending the collapse of paper-based publishing to be sooner rather than later, newspapers are slowly but surely taking to the Web. If the latest news is anything to go by, book publishers may not be far behind. Although the latest announcement by Mills and Boon of a romance-fiction based social network does not represnt a publishing shift, in the future we may see mainstream publishers shift all or major portions of their publishing and distribution models online.
