On Booksquare, Kassia Krozser has a really interesting (and really long) essay about the social nature of reading and how to accommodate it in the Internet age. She points out that, much as e-book companies like Copia are making a big deal out of intersecting social networking with reading, our reading has almost always been “social” in the real world—we started out discussing stories around fires, and we still discuss (and review, and write fanfic of) stories even today. The big difference is that we’ve moved it on-line.

Krozser spends much of the essay talking about a proposed all-inclusive system for aggregating book-based conversation—”user-generated content” or “UGC” around books. Even Facebook and Twitter are too limiting, she explains, because they’re still “walled communities”, even if the areas enclosed by the walls are huge. Even though she admits she’s indulging in “magical thinking”, it’s an interesting thought experiment.

What she is fundamentally talking about is a way to combine every single public book-related conversation on the ‘net into one place. While it is hard to imagine this happening for every conversation, perhaps if such a system were designed right it could at least be a home to many of them.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that if such a thing were built anyone would actually come to it. As a friend who I was discussing the article with pointed out, if you want to find conversation around a book or e-book now, you simply type it into a search engine. And he also suggested that it sounded an awful lot like Google Sidewiki and other website-annotation services—ideas that seemed interesting at first but largely failed because almost nobody actually wanted to use them. (I know it’s very rare for me to see any Google Sidewiki posts about any but the most popular sites.)

The level of social discourse available around books on the Internet now is certainly way beyond anything we could manage before the Internet came along, and it is worth trying to figure out ways it could be greater—but it’s unclear whether we really need such a thing, or how many people would actually use it if we had it.

5 COMMENTS

  1. Anytime folks pick up one of the few remaining book review publications they are socially interacting with the reviewers and with their fellow readers. The Internet versions of said circulars are even more interactive as feedback on the reviews is posted with unstinting regularity.

  2. Krozser starts with good points and good intentions and then completely looses all perspective. People in real life don’t want to interact with 20 million other people who liked the same book. What do want to interact with 20 or 30.

    The only real places where reading has been social and interactive in the past (other than book clubs) is in our immediate families and close social group. Reviewers have most certainly not produced any interactivity, only a one way street.
    I believe what Copia is doing is really important and is the future of online reading interactivity and a major driver of future sales. I think that readers, who are a more mature bunch on the whole than the facebook and myspace etc crowd, will not want to hook into massive world wide online communities. If they are offered a quality online experience (within their eReader) they will gravitate to niche sites and special interest/genre/ geographical/ generational/cultural sites where there is more intimacy and shared experience.
    I also believe this is one of the most powerful reasons why smaller eRetailers CAN compete with the Amazon et al and they should not be throwing their hands in the air like so many pundits declare they should.

  3. I hang out on targeted review and book discussion sites: a list that discusses the work of Lois McMaster Bujold, for example, or a review site that reviews works in a specific genre of which I am fond. I trust the reviews on those sites. I may not agree with them, but I always know whether I”ll like a book reviewed there. This projected kind of massively social discussion pool would dilute that trust, and I have absolutely no interest in it.

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