Share favorite books from Amazon.com on Facebook?

Always glad to hear from another reader. I suggest that reports of the demise of the printed word are just quite possibly a bit exaggerated. Then again, you could be talking about ebooks for your Kindle or Nook for all I know. But still, it's a book and you're still reading, right, so it's all good in the end!

Back before Amazon fully embraced social media, the only way to accomplish what you wanted was to copy and paste those long, complicated Amazon URLs into a status update, hope it would pick up the book cover, and then leave your additional comment. Not very efficient and rather a pain.

Recently Amazon added some slick social networking features that make this all considerably easier, I'm glad to report. You just have to have eagle eyes to see the subtle addition to the product information pages on Amazon itself.

Here's an example, the information page from The Four-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss:

Can you see on the right where it says "Share" and has a tiny box with a downward-facing triangle? Turns out it's a pop-up that appears if you just move the cursor over the link:

If you're thinking that you should click on the "Facebook" link, you're right! Doing so pops up a window that shows the book cover, a brief description and offers a space to enter your own comments too:

I'm going to add my own comment, but to make this interesting, I'm also going to push my message to everyone on Facebook, not just my friends. That's done by clicking on the little padlock icon, as you can also see in this capture:

A click on "Share" and it's submitted to Facebook...

(If you've never connected Amazon and Facebook, you might get a window popping up here ensuring that you've granted Amazon permission to access your Facebook account. Obviously, do so!)

Wondering how it appears on Facebook? It's pretty neat...

Now, what are those books you've been recommending?

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