Not really. I think a community has two main uses: helping you discover new things, and finding solutions to problems you have with them.<p>The discoverability argument suffers for two reasons. First, people don't read very interesting books. I've never came across something genuinely special that I hadn't already read, online. Second, books are already very discoverable - since universities prepare reading lists, authors recommend stuff, and books reference each other.<p>The first problem holds for whatever you consider an interesting book - unless, perhaps, you like bestsellers. Reading is by nature a very fragmented passtime - and no two readers have the same taste.<p>The possible exception to the first problem is in itself a problem - popular books tend to drown out the less popular ones - until your book forum no longer helps discovery since it just talks about very discoverable bestsellers.<p>I'd only really be interested in a book forum if it offered something very different to what exists already. I think it would be interesting, for instance, to have a domain-specific set of forums (say, 'victorian gothic', 'medieval european'), then have a hard test that you have to pass to post in them. I don't think this would work either - but it would be different.