Netbook or Notbook? M-e-Reader or W-e-Reader
It is a fact of life that people like to share ideas and new-found knowledge. They also like to have discussions about them. Today, it’s easy to share thanks to the Internet and the myriad of tools available online. Links can be shared via social bookmarks, passages in web pages can be highlighted and shared via annotation systems, funny lists (and not-so-funny ones) can be easily forwarded in an email. When it comes to books however, our ability for participatory involvement–the kind we see in a blog post or online newspaper article–is quite limited. Sure, we can talk about a book on sites like Amazon or GoodReads, but we are not easily able to reference its contents or view “group-think” about particular passages. Soon this will all change and so will book learning.
Today’s enthusiasm around e-readers has mostly to do with their ability to store many books, their crisp screens, and their ability for instant delivery of content. Their main shortcoming however, is that they do not connect to each other in a way that plays to our social inclinations. What little connectivity they have, is primarily for the delivery of content and not for the creation of conversation. E-readers will become powerful learning tools when they allow for two-way conversations centered around the books loaded onto them. Responding to people’s desire to interact and learn from one another, developers will design e-book platforms with sharing and conversation in mind. This will change everything.
Let’s look at some of the possibilities of a networked book:
The evolved, peer-connected e-book will allow us to expand our dialog about books worldwide and allow us to look at individual and aggregated feedback in ways never before possible. We will soon be able to highlight text in a book, possibly commenting on it, then share it either with groups, individuals or the entire public. While tools like Diigo allow for some of this functionality using networked computers, books–especially current ones–have remained largely untouched by collaborative markup systems.
Whose book notes do you follow?
We’ll be able to follow various personalities, much the same way we can on Twitter, and see reader’s highlights and marginalia. (Of course, people would have to decide on what level of sharing they are comfortable with.) It would be very interesting, for example, to be able to turn on guest highlights, and see how Bill Gates annotates Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, or vice-versa. Maybe you have a trusted blogger, someone you consider an expert, and you’d like to see what they find worth noting when reading a particular book. One can imagine publishing houses wanting experts and celebrities to annotate their books, perhaps even paying them a fee so as to add value to the text. Which e-book do you think would be a better seller, the one with no celebrity annotations or the one marked up by Oprah?
Networked Reading
Learning machine
A networked book seems like a powerful, unobtrusive way to increase depth and quality of book-based learning. Classroom settings could benefit immensely. Students and teachers could easily see each others notes. Conversations could continue or develop outside of the classroom, free from the confines of time, place, or group. The ability to peer into other readers’ minds–especially experts’–will be enlightening. Imagine reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma and switching the reader notes between a prominent ethicist, politician, economist, and agronomist… Imagine the insights and innovative thinking that this type of cross-polination could fuel.
Aggregated book data
The possibility to look at aggregated book data has immense potential. We will be able to analyze a text in ways never before possible. Imagine reading Tipping Point on your e-reader and being able to see a list of the top 20 most-highlighted passages. I’d be curious to know what they are and what they say about the book and the people reading it. Each reader’s anonymized profile information could provide for some very interesting analysis. A word cloud could show the most common words being used to annotate a book. Clicking on one of the words in the cloud could take you to the comments and the phrases they refer to, sorted or filtered by gender, age, race, political orientation, or whatever other information people care to add to their public profiles. We could study Sarah Palin’s book using a variety of demographic variables and tags. Which passages did women highlight most often? Which ones did they disagree with most frequently? What do people in Alaska think of Chapter Five, Drill, Baby Drill? Captcha style features could be sprinkled throughout the book to see where people quit reading or which sections were skipped. Maybe we’ll know who’s more likely to have finished Palin’s book: a Democrat, Republican, or Independent.
With the right tools (think Google Analytics) the possibilities for literary analysis are mind-boggling. It will be interesting to see which combination of company (Amazon, B&N…), platform (Kindle, Sony…), standards, license types (open-source, proprietary…) will create the most lively community and build critical mass.
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eFolios
Participation Tools
