The annual National Book Festival is an opportune moment to reflect upon our reading practices. The ways in which we read impact many of our daily experiences and lives. As the famed novelist and scholar Alberto Manguel observes: “We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.”
This essential function – comprised of what, why, when, where, and how we read – determines our engagement with all kinds of information. But this essential function is experiencing some changes as we increasingly shift our focus from printed pages to networked screens.
The internet, digital devices, and their associated platforms and services have begun to make possible new ways of reading and engaging with information. Social reading, for example, is an emerging trend.
It involves groups of people – from several readers to groups of hundreds – reading the same document or book, often in real time, and commenting on the content, discussing with and responding to other readers’ comments, and contributing additional information to it. It is a synchronous reading practice in which readers are simultaneously engaging with the same document or book in diverse settings.
However, social reading is not the same as other kinds of social practices with documents and books. Social reading is not the same as conversations about a document or book. Conversations about a book and social reading are both social practices and valuable approaches to reading specifically and literacy generally, but they are different kinds of reading engagements and experiences.
Conversations about a book are indeed social practices. But these conversations are not immersive experiences that directly add to or affect the document or book, and by extension, other readings of it.
Social reading, meanwhile, is a more immersive social practice that also involves conversations about a book but that take place within the document or book. These conversations occur directly inside the document or book, in its margins and even within the text itself, enabling readers to simultaneously engage with the book in real time by commenting, questioning, highlighting, underlining, and otherwise discussing the content on the pages themselves. These contributions can include written text, audio, video, graphics, and interactive engagements.
These conversations within the book permit deeper engagements with the content as well as with other readers and authors themselves. Social reading allows readers to concentrate on certain sections of the document or book to go more deeply into the ideas and issues raised. These conversations are, in other words, threaded and ongoing conversations tied to specific sections or bits of content.
Readers can ask questions, make comments, and discuss different aspects or themes of the document or book during their reading. They are thus able to directly and immediately interact with the document or book, within the document or book, and with one another.
Social reading also enables and encourages closer interactions between readers and authors. As conversations take place within the text itself, readers and authors begin to occupy and share the same space. They can respond to different ideas, answer questions, and contribute to diverse interpretations and understandings of the content. Social reading allows for closer and deeper collaborations between readers and, significantly, between readers and authors.
Social reading, however, should also not be conflated with online commenting practices. While online commenting can also be valuable, it is not this kind of social reading. Commenting typically features the inclusion of comments below the main content instead of in its margins or directly in it itself. This kind of commenting can result in more restrictive engagements with the document or book.
It restricts the engagement to conversations about the document or book instead of direct engagement and collaboration within the text itself. It therefore does not permit for threaded conversations that associate comments, questions, or other ideas with specific sections or bits of text. It further restricts the collaboration and flexibility of engaging within the document or book by reinforcing the traditional structure of the author’s content above and the reader’s contributions below.
As we spend more time on networked screens, some of our reading practices are beginning to change and new ones, like social reading, are emerging
As social reading platforms and services continue to evolve, better and more refined features will be offered that will further improve this reading practice. For example, specialised commentary and real-time contributions from authors themselves or experts of the content under discussion; live author readings or other live performances of the book taking place inside the document or book itself; and new kinds of open-ended, continuous, serial stories that transform readers into writers collaborating on and contributing to the story’s development.
Hugh McGuire, the founder of the online publishing companies Pressbooks and Libravox, argues in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that information in all future e-books will be made open, accessible, and free for reading. He stated that “a lot of books will end up totally on the web, and that’s something that horrifies people for, I think, cultural reasons”.
He also said that many people may think that “books are important and the web is for Twitter and Facebook and silly things. I say this is a ridiculous notion. First of all, there’s an awful lot of schlock and not very good stuff which is published as books, and there’s an enormous amount of serious information that is on the web.”
According to McGuire, to access, read, and discuss that information, every page of every e-book will eventually become its own separate and searchable webpage with its own web address. He also predicts that most books, including print books, will have their own application programming interface allowing readers to interact with the content in personalised and unique ways. McGuire acknowledges, however, that for it to work, the information in books must be free and web-accessible.
For example, McGuire illustrates how an e-book version of Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel Dracula could offer this new kind of social reading experience. He describes how you and your friends could socially read Dracula simultaneously together online and then plan a special trip based on the book’s content.
An e-book version with its own application programming interface could produce a detailed map and GPS coordinates of all of the locations in the story. This detailed map could then be hyperlinked with a travel website that, in turn, could permit you to arrange and pay for transportation to and accommodations in London (a main location in the book). Once in London, this detailed map, synchronised with the GPS in your mobile phone, could help take you and your friends on a tour of London based on Dracula-themed references as you pass by or visit locations featured in the book.
As we spend more time on networked screens, some of our reading practices are beginning to change and new ones, like social reading, are emerging. Social reading is helping transform documents and books into spaces of agency, where readers can directly and simultaneously engage with and within documents and books, and with other readers.
It allows readers to contribute content inside the margins and texts of documents and books. Social reading, in other words, is helping transform documents and books into places of community where people can actively connect, collaborate, and contribute in important, meaningful, and social ways.
Marc Kosciejew is a lecturer at the University of Malta.