Since Twitter launched in 2006, there have been tons of unique uses of the platform, including fundraising, live tweeting the State of the Union, and now thanks to Penguin, a book club.

I’ve seen some corners of Twitter take to using hashtags to create a conversation on the platform. While it can be difficult to follow a conversation on the service, especially in real-time, Penguin thinks that the time-shifted hobby of reading books is a perfect way to bring people together.

The publisher will be picking a book each month, and suggests that its followers tweet their thoughts about it using the hashtag #readpenguin. At the end of the month, Penguin will hold a Twitter chat with the book’s author as its guest. The publisher has asked that its followers not to tweet spoilers for the book, which is ongoing Twitter issue I personally deal with, especially when it comes to TV.

The book club has kicked off for February with its first title, “The Weird Sisters”. At the end of the month, Eleanor Brown, its author, will talk to fans of the book about what they thought and answer any questions that they have. It’s like a virtual book-signing, without the signing part.

As brands look for new ways to engage its customers, it’s nice to see Penguin marry the old-school notion of a book club with the new-school tradition of tweeting your thoughts as they come to you.

➤ Penguin Book Club on Twitter

Amazon realizes that while its Kindle devices might be selling really well, there are a whole lot of people who prefer to read their books on an iPad.

Because of that reason, Amazon has released an iPad optimized version of its Kindle Store that looks and feels like a native app. No installation required though, simply visit: http://www.amazon.com/iPadKindleStore on your iPad to get the full experience.

The web app does a fantastic job of utilizing all of the extra real estate on the iPad’s screen, as well as allowing you to touch your way through the library of available titles to read on your Kindle app.

When you visit the page and log in, you’ll find the books that are recommended for you in all of its big juicy cover flow-esque glory. As you swipe your way through titles, you can tap on one of them for more detail. Once again, the web app uses the iPad’s extra real estate to show you detailed descriptions and user reviews.

After you purchase a title, you can read it within the Kindle app on your iPad or via Amazon’s online Cloud Reader, which is also optimized for the device.

➤ Kindle Store for iPad

Purchasing books has been transformed a lot recently with the arrival of the iPad and Amazon Kindle devices. Browsing through books for purchase has never been simpler.

Unfortunately, browsing for books to buy on the web isn’t quite an elegant experience. Even Amazon‘s own site has felt stale for sometime without major upgrades or special treatment. Having to search for books the same way you would search for clothing or other items to buy on Amazon.com feels almost like it’s from 2001.

Even though books are going digital, people are still buying physical copies. I passed up on buying the digital version of the Steve Jobs book, as I wanted the physical version to hold in my hands.

Bookflavor pulls in books from Amazon’s site and displays them in an extremely attractive and simplistic way, and also shows way more book reviews than even Amazon.

It’s all in the presentation

When you go to Bookflavor, you’re shown the top sellers on Amazon by default. You can also switch between that and the New York Times Best Sellers list.

The books are shown in a large thumbnail on a white background, and aren’t numbered. It’s a simplistic presentation that is reminiscent of how books a shown on the iPad and Kindle Fire. Clicking on the book will take you to its own page, with information pulled from Amazon and GoodReads. The information is shown on a similar white background in large font. The site itself even looks great on the iPad.

As you scroll down the book’s page, you’ll find reviews from both Amazon and GoodReads. This is something that Amazon should take notice of. Getting book reviews from all different services on the web is important. Having as much information and perspective on a book before buying it is nice to have. While Bookflavor only pulls in the two, I imagine that it would be simple for the developer to pull in even more services. That’s the only downside of the site.

If you’re still buying physical books from Amazon, you might want to skip the Amazon site until its time to checkout. Bookflavor has a link on its book pages directly to the Amazon page for purchasing, but your decision may already be made thanks to a recommendation from someone who never wrote it in to Amazon’s site.

➤ Bookflavor

According to Nielsen, the Steve Jobs biography written by Walter Isaacson has sold over 379,000 copies in its first week in the US alone.

“Steve Jobs” is already the 18th bestselling book of the year, having only been available for six weeks.

The book was officially released on October 24th, but has been a bestseller since it was available for pre-order. It hasn’t been since last November, where Jeff Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth” and George W Bush’s “Decision Points” sold more copies in under seven days.

Along with the 379,000 copies sold in the U.S., “Steve Jobs” has sold over 37,000 copies in the U.K., making it one of the fast-selling non-fiction books ever.

The fascination with the life and death of Steve Jobs has been a continual story since his passing on October 6th. Numerous passages were leaked by reviewers, making their way to publications all over the world. The true body of work is still holding our interest though, with the leaks not slowing down sales one bit.

Purchasing online and offline is converging, as digital experiences become designed around the in-store experiences that we’re used to. We all know what it feels like to walk into a book store, or even a library, and browse the books on the shelf.

Apple’s Books app is a gorgeous design and experience, mimicking that of a bookshelf, but Google has outdone them with its WebGL Bookcase which is hosted on its “Chrome Experiments” site. The site has hundreds of beautiful interface projects that you can check out.

Google said this about the WebGL Bookcase today on its blog:

A digital interface needs to be familiar enough to be intuitive, while simultaneously taking advantage of the lack of constraints in a virtual space. In this case, we imagined something that looks like the shelves in your living room, but is also capable of showcasing the huge number of titles available online—many more than fit on a traditional shelf. With this in mind, we designed a digital bookcase that’s an infinite 3D helix. You can spin it side-to-side and up and down with your mouse. It holds 3D models of more than 10,000 titles from Google Books.

The books are organized into 28 subjects. To choose a subject, click the subject button near the top of your screen when viewing the bookcase. The camera then flies to that subject. Clicking on a book pulls it off the shelf and brings it to the front and center of the screen. Click on the high-resolution cover and the book will open to a page with title and author information as well as a short synopsis, provided by the Google Books API. All of the visuals are rendered with WebGL, a technology in Google Chrome and other modern browsers that enables fast, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics right in the browser, without the need for a plug-in.

If you’ve finished your browsing and find a book you want to read, you can click the “Get this book” button on the bottom right of the page, which will send you to that book’s page on books.google.com. Or, you can open the title on your phone or tablet via the QR code that’s in the bottom left corner of the page, using a QR code app like Google Goggles. You can also browse just free books by selecting the “Free Books” subject in the subject viewer.

Google posted the video below, which shows how intuitive it is to browse through books, get more information on them, and even “get the book” by purchasing it from Google Books.

You can try it out for yourself, here. Fair warning though, the project appears to work best using Google’s Chrome Browser, and if you have a slower machine the intensive graphical WebGL technology could slow you down.

Would you purchase more books with an experience like this? I feel like Amazon‘s layout and display of items is old, and relies mostly on its recommendations for other products. It doesn’t feel like a store at all, and Google has shown that it’s possible to bring you a better browsing and purchasing experience with WebGL.

Read about how Google is using WebGL to bring 3D Maps to desktop browsers.

Amazon has today announced that it is to launch its own Kindle Lending Library service. The feature will allow Kindle customers to borrow Kindle books from over 11,000 libraries in the United States.

The company says that customers will be able to check out a Kindle book from their local library and start reading on any Kindle device or app free of charge. Amazon will work with OverDrive, a digital content solution provider for libraries in the US to offer what it promises will be a “seamless library borrowing experience” for Kindle users.

An interesting feature is that  any annotations and bookmarks left by a user when they borrow a book will be preserved if they subsequently borrow it again or purchase it at a later date.

Borrowing Kindle books is something that users have been keen to do for some time, leading to the establishment of a number of unofficial solutions such as LendInk and the Kindle Lending Club, which later evolved into BookLending.com. It appears that Amazon’s service will require users to physically visit a library, however.

The scheme will launch later in the year.

The world is evolving far too quickly for us to keep up with it.

Formerly our main forms of entertainment were spending time with family and playing with the dog, but in our advanced digital age, we’re all glued to our flat-screen TVs in high definition, our laptop computers that surf the web at lightning speed and our mobile phones that are almost like handheld computers that also fit in your pocket and make calls.

Let’s take some time to reflect on the beauty that was traditional media and how all that’s changed in our new media world.

Before big blogs, you only read the NY Times

News that was hot off-the-wire was the only news that you knew. It was simple. You looked at the big headlines, read a bit into the details, and didn’t worry too much about all the other things in life.

Now, we’re overflowing with information, reading blogs with added commentary to today’s news, understanding what’s happening in the world more in-depth because information not only contains announcements, but analysis.

Before YouTube, there was TV

You anxiously waited for your Prime Time television shows to come on, and you never missed an episode because it would be a long time and an arduous task to make up the lost airing. It was simple, you watched TV from 8 – 10pm every weeknight.

Now you’re on YouTube, watching viral video after viral video from when you get out of work until dinner time, then after dinner time, you’re back on to watch more videos until it’s time to pass out at 1 or 2 am.

Before Netflix, you had the movie theatre

Going to the theatres was one of the nicest pleasures on a Friday night. You take your date or a few friends and get ready to get sucked into 2 hours of non-stop, audio and visual entertainment that only a real movie theatre could provide with its surround sound, large screen projection and overpriced and over greased popcorn.

Now, with movies on-demand, having the ability to stream top flicks and borrow unlimited amounts of DVDs without late charges, you’re more than comfortable staying in bed to watch a movie than travel to the theatre and spend $10 on one film ticket.

Before the Kindle, you had paperback books

Remember that nice shelf of books you used to have? The same one with all the classics your father read to you when you were a child, with the books that got you through those boring high school years spent at home, and even those that you get comfort in curling up to some nights after a long, long day of work.

Now, when space is becoming a limited resource and buying titles off of your Kindle is quick, easy and cheap, you can’t help but take advantage of the fact that you can access thousands more books than your apartment could handle, and thousands more books than you can physically read.

Before Digg, Reddit and even StumbleUpon, you asked for a trusted friend’s opinion or waited for someone to email you a useful link

You loved when a friend shared something useful. It was like a nice treat at the end of your day when you looked at your personal email inbox and saw a friendly message from your trusted friend sharing an interesting article to a story that you otherwise would not have seen.

Now, links and such are flying every which way, and you’re prone to click anything you see with a big, eye-catching headline. While our abundance of information has been such a great thing, sometimes you get the longing for more simplicity.

This digital age has surely changed the way we consume media, and clearly has its pros and cons. But it’s at least nice to look back every once and a while and think about the way things used to be, even if we decide to continue moving away from the traditional methods.