The Threadless book club was an interesting experiment which was ultimately one of the many victims of my illness of early 2008.

It turns out that organising a large group of bloggers from around the globe to read a book every month requires a little more organisation than I'm really capable of handling casually in my leisure time.

That said Threadless does have a large group of people who love to read so I think that such a group could be successful and I put the failure of our group down more to my own inability to organise people as opposed to any flaw in the concept.

I'd love it if someone else wanted to try and organise a book club here.

Here's a few things that I've learned from our experiment, it's worth noting that these are my own opinions and observations and that I have very little in the way of hard data to back them up.

Take heed or not as you wish.

Threadless people seem to hate email

We're great at checking blogs and are instant messengers without peer (though primarily on AIM) but Threadlessbians don't seem to write much.

As such I'd recommend trying to organise things on the blogs or, if time zones don't interfere, via IM.

They have really diverse tastes

Not too surprising given the wide audience that Threadless caters to, I know.

I mention this mainly because I think a group might enjoy more success if you set it up such that you were reading from a specific genre or type of work.

One of the biggest obstacles was getting a book that enough people wanted to read to generate a conversation. Once conversations got running the members of the group were - on the whole - intelligent, articulate and interesting but getting enough people to read a work to generate conversation presented a challenge.

We have really busy lives

By and large Threadlesbians seem to hang around Threadless because they enjoy the site, it's products or the community.

As such we see the time we spend here as leisure time don't want to commit to any hefty ordeals (and who can blame us).

The surveys that I sent out revealed a fairly strong preference for works of no more than two or three hundred pages. As such I can imagine that a group that focused on short stories, novella, plays, poems and so on would be more likely to retain members.

In closing

I want to thank everyone who participated in the Threadless book club in any capacity, whether you read a book or participated in a conversation or not.

I had a great time with it and I want to express my regrets over the fact that I got sick and was unable to devote to this project the time it deserved.

I met some lovely people through the book club and hope to continue receiving updates from you all on goodreads.

Anyone in the future who is interested in taking a shot at organising a book club is welcome to shoot me an email or catch me on the blogs, I'd love to hear from you.