Kinilog

» see kinilog.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

You checked in to a book. That was the pitch NTT Solmare launched on 4 August 2011 under the name Bookcrew, two years after Foursquare, when checking in to things was the shape every new social product wanted. The check-in recorded a state and the states ran from acquired to finished, with a separate pair for whether you were interested in the thing at all. Books landed on a shelf. You could open the shelf to friends, and reading a lot or writing reviews earned you patches.

It came out of NTT Solmare's comic division, which is not where you would expect to find a books-and-friends site. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of NTT West, set up in Osaka in 2002, and the business that pays for the building is selling manga. Bookcrew searched print books and ebooks together from its first day, and the 2012 announcement introduced the company as a leading firm in electronic books before it got anywhere near the product. What it never did was link to the company's own store. The only commerce on the page was Amazon affiliate links.

Fourteen months in, the name went. On 3 October 2012 Bookcrew became Kinilog, with a new wordmark in four colors and a scope that was no longer about books: kini comes from kininaru, the Japanese for something catching your eye, and the renamed service logged music, foreign-language books and DVDs alongside the novels. The affiliate tag on the outbound links never changed. It still read bookcrew-22 in the last copy the Internet Archive took, five years after the brand it was named for had stopped existing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it grew into ~

By the last live capture in September 2017 the catalog carried item IDs running past five million eight hundred thousand, which is a count of database rows rather than of people. There were genre pages, author pages and tag pages, rankings, a new-items rail fed by publication dates, a follow graph with likes and comments under everything. You could sign in with an email address or hand it a Facebook or Twitter account. What there was not, in six years, was an app. The 2011 announcement had listed iOS and Android alongside discussions, groups, a trivia quiz and a public API as things that were coming. Not one of them appears to have arrived.

It also got almost no attention anywhere. INTERNET Watch covered the Bookcrew launch in 2011 and the National Diet Library's current-awareness service noted it the same week. After that there is effectively nothing. No trade coverage of the 2012 rename and none of the 2017 closing, and no membership figure published by anyone at any point across six years. Goodreads did this in English and is still running. Shelfari did it and got absorbed. Either way there are numbers to argue over, and the Japanese one ran for six years and left none behind.

~ the export that saved reviews ~

The notice went up on 20 June 2017 and set the end at eleven on the morning of Tuesday 31 October, a time of day that suggests a maintenance window rather than a ceremony. It thanks customers for their long patronage. It gives no reason whatsoever.

What it does give is an export, shipped as a new feature specifically for the shutdown, with the three steps printed in the notice: log in, click settings at the top right, choose data export. The scope is narrower than it sounds. The feature exported the reviews you had written. The shelves and the follows are not mentioned anywhere in it, and neither are the six years of check-ins recording what you had acquired and what you had finished. The service closed with all of that still inside it.

~ which pages the company kept ~

Go to nttsolmare.com today and the release announcing Bookcrew in August 2011 is still there, serving a clean 200, with an addendum added at some later point noting that the service now runs as Kinilog. The release announcing the rename in October 2012 is still there too. The release announcing the shutdown, on the same host, in the same directory, under the same naming scheme, returns a 404 page byte for byte identical to the one you get for an address the company has never used. Both births are on the site. The death has to be fetched from the Internet Archive.

The service itself held on for a few months as a tombstone, a 2 KB page headed with the closing notice, frozen at the same byte count capture after capture from November 2017 into the following spring. The farewell text on it was an image file rather than words, and the Archive never collected the image, so what it actually said is gone. After that kinilog.jp became an affiliate page about diet leggings. Then the registration lapsed, and now the name does not resolve at all.

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