There is a stack of books on my basement desk that I have used for the social media course I teach each year. Some of these were books I had read, some were recommended, some I borrowed from the college library.

I have my students read at least one title selected based on their own area of interest in social media. The original list of titles was crowdsourced online.

If you have an interest in social media, you may want to check out some of these. If you have a book to recommend to me or my college students, post it in a comment here.

1. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected, Connect Your Business to Everyone.
2. What Would Google Do? – Jeff Jarvis
3. Power Friending – Amber MacArthur
4. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices – Christopher Locke
5. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations – Clay Shirky
6. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies – Charlene Li
7. Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations – Amy Shuen
8. Designing for the Social Web – Joshua Porter
9. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future – S. Craig Watkins
10. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone – patterns, principles, and best practices for starting a social website – has more of a software and design focus
11. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. – Mitch Joel – a business focus on using Net marketing, esp. free tools and services
12. Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee ~ Web 2.0 for the enterprise
13. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation – Tim Brown
14. The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (From Publishers Weekly) Hunt, cofounder of community-marketing consulting firm Citizen Agency, presents the hows and whys of accruing “whuffie,” her word for social capital in the Web 2.0 landscape. Introducing a wide range of post-blogosphere social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr, Hunt clues in marketers to the possibilities with online success stories, influential voices and winning strategies. Detailed, practical profiles of networks and related tools make this a valuable, illuminating title for anyone looking to the ever-expanding realm of online social life for business success.
15. The Cluetrain Manifesto – though ten years old, the authors’ 95 theses about the networked marketplace probably make more sense today. Observations about business in America and how the Internet will continue to change it.
16. Visual Thinking  by Rudolf Arnheim – more for art students perhaps – takes the premise that all thinking (not just thinking related to art) is basically perceptual in nature, and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading.
17. Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site –  by Gavin Bell
18. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success – Safko
19. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins.  This book puts web 2.0 technologies and trends into a much larger historical context of participatory culture.
20. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green
21. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success
22. The Zen of Social Media Marketing: An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz, and Increase Revenue
23. Social Media Marketing For Dummies
24. The Social Media Marketing Book
25. Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to Develop Your Business Online
26. Social Media at Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance
27. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs
28. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business
29. Facebook Marketing: Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Business
30. 10 Steps to Successful Social Networking for Business (ASTD’s 10 Steps Series)
31. Get Connected: The Social Networking Toolkit for Business
32. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications
33. The Facebook Era
34. Twitter Power 2.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time