Reading with a 'mob'

The Web, and a few clever people, keep making it easier to do at a distance what people once did face-to-face. Take reading, of the collaborative kind - the kind that leads to discussion. The kind that's done by a classful of students with an assigned text, friends in a reading group communing over the latest novel or memoir, and office colleagues working over a shared document.

There are software "solutions" for some such situations, but nothing, I dare say, at the level of SocialBook. This is a long-gestation project soon to come out of beta-testing, from the clever people at the Institute for the Future of the Book (they call it IF), a sparky little organisation founded by Robert "Bob" Stein, the tech visionary behind multimedia CD-ROMs and film DVDs with "extra features" (the Criterion Collection).

Yes, that sounds old. But SocialBook is, at last, multimedia applied properly and simply to a book, in such a way that it also uses the astonishing community-creating effect of the Web.

How the hell is one supposed to read communally, you may ask. Well, once upon a time all reading was done aloud - the root of writing is in speech. But that changed in the early medieval West; and Arab scholars hastened the process by inserting spaces between words in their manuscripts. (You see, until the Arabs you had to read aloud to know when to stop one word and begin the next. The "space" hadn't been invented. Curiously, some Urdu newspapers today don't use the word-space.)

Visit Futureofthebook.org, the IF site, and follow the links (registration required) to see how SocialBook works. It isn't immediately appealing to the solo reader, but do poke around. There are 145 books in the library so far; you are free to add your own. I looked at an edition of Thomas More's Utopia, in which the 16th-century English statesman and stickler imagined an ideal society, thus casting a sharp light on his own. There are hundreds of comments, several to a page, and they range from the inane (many) to the thoughtful. Not useful to me - unless I were part of that particular group of readers. So, with a click, I can start my own group, and flip between different sets of comments and the discussions that ensue.

I like the idea. The medium makes no claim to permanence; someone learns, and the body of More's Utopia suffers no permanent damage.

But then Bob Stein goes and talks big. "For now," he says on the IF blog, "it's better to continuously redefine the definition of 'book' until something else clearly takes its place." And, "Our grandchildren will assume that reading with others, i.e. social reading, is the 'natural' way to read. They will be amazed to realize that in our day reading was something one did alone. Reading by one's self will seem as antiquated as silent movies are to us."

And, in the IF mission statement, "Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress."

Argh! It's not a tool - it's the future? Imagine the burden on author and publisher and serious reader: to have to watch and applaud as the book is picked apart and squatted on by lesser intelligences. If "social reading" is the future, then we are looking at immortalising the impermanent. Please will some clever tech-futurist invent a mighty algorithm, a Rating God, a Great Judgement in the Sky, to identify the few quality comments and discussions and throw away the rest after their purpose is served?

Reserve your own judgement, however, until you "social-read" a book that makes fuller use of multimedia. One is a pre-release memorial volume of pieces on and writings and speeches by the digital-access campaigner Aaron Swartz (he helped develop the Creative Commons, RSS, Reddit, etc.; look them up), who killed himself in New York earlier this year, aged 26, after being relentlessly prosecuted for downloading a large number of academic articles. The written and spoken words of this intelligent and compassionate young man should stimulate good comment.

rraote@yahoo.com