New Kindle social networking features are welcome, if limited

Social networking has finally reached e-books, albeit in a limited way. A new (2.5) version of Kindle software allows you to post passages from Kindle books, with comments, to your Facebook page and Twitter account.

The feature is easy to set up and works fine, I found in informal testing. If the 2.5 software isn't yet on your Kindle (check its settings for the version it's running), it should load automatically, over the Kindle's 3G connection. The download to my Kindle was complete in less than 10 minutes.

You then access your Kindle settings from the device and enter and save the usernames and passwords for your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Those preliminaries over, you can now share any passage of a book whenever you want. You begin by clicking down on the Kindle joystick at the point at which you'd like to start the excerpt and continue clicking, line by line, until you've excerpted as much as you'd like.

You then follow the prompt in the pop-up menu to press the ALT and return keys simultaneously. You can add a short comment, subject to the customary character limitations for Facebook posts and Twitter tweets. Using the joystick again, you navigate to, and click on, the word "share."

Moments later, my comments and the excerpt posted to both accounts. The Facebook posting included an excerpt from the top of the book excerpt, followed by a link for the entire excerpt, which was posted to a Kindle online page. The tweet included only my comment, followed by a link to the excerpt.

However, you can't easily check from your Kindle that the excerpt actually posted, or view friends' comments on it; the app doesn't include a way to access those social-media accounts, only to post to them.

Nor can you easily choose to post to only one or the other of the platforms, except by returning to the settings and signing out of either your Twitter or Facebook account. That could be annoying if, say, you wanted to write a comment that exceeded the 140-character limit for a tweet but was within the 1000-character limit for a Facebook posting.

Finally, at present the functionality seems to be available only for the Kindle; it isn't yet a feature of the Kindle apps for other devices, including the Apple iPad.

Despite these limitations, however, the Kindle's social networking feature offers a potentially useful tool for digital bookworms to easily share book passages with one another. It also offers a first glimpse into a future in which e-books and social networks seem destined to grow closer and closer.

—Paul Reynolds