Social e-books

Compiled by: Chris Armstrong, Consultant & Trainer lisqual@cix.co.uk http://www.i-a-l.co.uk/resource_ebook2011.html December 2011

Wikipedia, a form of e-book with which many readers will be familiar is in fact a special sub-genre of an e-book: the social or networked book. In the last few years, social or communal computing (generally dubbed Web 2.0) has extended to the e-book, so that we can define a sub-genre of the born-digital e-book as the social or networked book: an e-book developed either collaboratively or taking account of / influenced by comments from readers.

The first born-digital e-books are epitomised by City Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago, 1870s-1930s http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/citysites/. It is noteworthy because of its use of the medium: it includes in its virtual pages sound clips, images, moving images, and pop-up annotations and citations, as well as different ways of moving through the text. Linear reading has moved on to hyperlinked snippets and topical pathways which move from essay to essay as they follow a particular theme. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page started in 2001 and was perhaps the next great move forward in e-books. It is a large and successful experiment in social book development. Anyone can add to its pages and we are all editors of existing content, and other wiki books have been developed such as the Encyclopedia of Life http://www.eol.org/ or Wikibooks http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page. But there are other examples of social books.

More recently the proliferation of blogs has produced a new phenomenon: dubbed 'blooks', books written on blogs as a series of posts are an interesting experiment in iterative publishing. This approach was used by L Lee Lowe, who has published a series of short stories for "young adults of all ages" on his blog. The stories are powerful and if any reader needs convincing that fiction can be read on the screen, 'Noise' http://lleelowe.com/short-stories/noise/ will hold them gripped. The short stories were followed by serialised novels: the equally-powerful Mortal Ghost and Corvus http://lleelowe.com/ were both published taking into account reader’s comments.

In another approach, a closed group of authors collaborated on 217 Babel Street  - "a web of interconnected stories" set in a seaside apartment block. There were twenty apartments in the building. Each of the four writers worked independently of the others, starting off stories from different rooms… Writers could interrupt and take over each other’s stories, taking them in different directions. Month by month the narrative changed, expanding into new rooms, characters and situations, creating new pathways for readers to explore. Sadly the site and its block of flats have now been withdrawn.  Similarly innovative approaches to web writing can be seen at Penguin’s http://wetellstories.co.uk/.

The social element of the Web – as also seen in social bookmarking (such as Flickr http://www.flickr.com/, Connotea http://www.connotea.org/ and Delicious http://delicious.com/, as well as in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page itself, is extending to academic texts, where authors are acknowledging that remote experts may have valuable contributions to their own thought processes. Professor Lawrence Lessig first wrote Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 1999. As he wrote later, “after five years in print and five years of changes in law, technology, and the context in which they reside, Code needs an update.” Rather than follow the conventional route, Professor Lessig used a wiki to open the editing process to all, thus drawing upon “the creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online, collaborative book update; a first of its kind...” As the project neared its completion, Professor Lessig took the contents of this wiki and developed it for publication. The resulting book, Code v.2, was published in late 2006 by Basic Books.

In similar vein, Charles Leadbetter wrote We Think (http://www.wethinkthebook.net/book/home.aspx) and Joseph J Esposito evolved The Platform Book http://prosaix.com/pbos/book-6-0.html - based on an earlier essay on "various aspects of the book in the digital era" and created using a Processed Book Operating System. Anyone can annotate the text as they read it - indeed, highlighting a phrase or word immediately causes a drop down menu with choices such as 'Create BookMark', 'Create Note', 'Create OutgoingLink' and 'Create BizVantage Topic'. Previously added annotations are signified by a boxed 'Note' in the right-hand margin. As Mitchell Stephens said of Without Gods:

The blog http://www.futureofthebook.org/mitchellstephens/ I am writing here, with the connivance of The Institute for the Future of the Book [IFB] http://www.futureofthebook.org/, is an experiment. Our thought is that my book on the history of atheism (eventually to be published by Carroll and Graf) will benefit from an online discussion as the book is being written. Our hope is that the conversation will be joined: ideas challenged, facts corrected, queries answered; that lively and intelligent discussion will ensue. And we have an additional thought: that the web might realize some smidgen of benefit through the airing of this process. [The experiment has now ended.]

Moving further into the e-book community, GAM3R 7H30RY by McKenzie Wark http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/ was an entirely new design and an experiment in the delivery of e-books. Once again supported by the IFB, GAM3R 7H30RY offers a reading experience designed for the screen as well as the opportunity for discussion with readers. The granular approach to the text meant that screen real estate can be managed well and debate focusses on precise areas of content.

The Institute has subsequently made available CommentPress software http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/: CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. …

Similarly, around 100 school librarians in USA developed School Libraries: a free e-book http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/96705. Jonathan Stark, with his publishers, O’Reilly, is experimenting with an ‘Open Feedback Publishing System’ for his latest book http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9780596805784/.

The other side of the coin, Social Reading is best epitomised by BookGlutton http://www.bookglutton.com/, which includes books from O’Reilly, Random House, and McGraw-Hill, and allows readers to annotate and exchange comments on the text (chapter or whole book) in real time, as they read. IFB experimented over a short period with a Doris Lessing title http://thegoldennotebook.org/ allowing 12 contemporary authors and the public to comment as they read. There is also Booktrope http://www.booktrope.com/, which allows debates in individual fora for each book.

So, the book has evolved a parallel, social form; apart from quite a lot of books written in blogs, there’s not much there yet, but there are some very interesting approaches and products emerging. And anyone can do it… with a wiki or a blog!

These titles and others are described in more depth in the UKeiG publication, The 2011 Guide to Free or Nearly-Free e-Books, available from Lulu via http://www.ukeig.org.uk/content/publications. 

Pdf Version: 

Social_e_books_final2011_Dec11.pdf