So we’re starting a book club. No, not like Oprah.

Right, so, not like Oprah, I swear. The first differentiator might be that the idea came to me over a nice glass of Aberlour Whiskey in Montreal with good friends. I’ve been trying to discipline my reading lately and my friends are generally consuming the most interesting books on the planet as far as I’m concerned. So the idea is to combine forces, and like Oprah, conduct things remotely (okay, so one point against). But! Since the initial group is a crack team of designers, programmers and cultural enthusiasts, I figure it will be a great opportunity to play with the concept of what a book club is.

We’ll be tossing around different ideas of what to do with that gleaned knowledge once we’ve pealed through those pages. We’re talking about creating and publishing information models for a book or building a web app that employs a core concept of a book or making a major change in our own workflows or lives based on a concept from a book.

The bookshelf above is from Shelfari, the tool we’re using to organize our group, which so happens to be bloody amazing. It really gives a certain respect to the books you love that other media organizing sites like last.fm seem to miss. And its a joy to use and share the books you’ve read with your friends.

I’m mostly writing this here as public colateral to ensure I stick to this idea since I like it so damned much. If anyone’s interested in checking out the club please, do take a look and hop in if you like.