NYTimes announced that Oprah is returning with a new, 21-century version of her book club (here is her intro video). The core of the undertaking are the customized, electronic editions of the club selection, available as e-books on all popular reading platforms (Kindle, Nook, and iOS – iBooks for iPad and iPhone).
This is going to be a really interesting, ambitious experiment. I actually plan to read this book (as an e-book), just to see how ( if? ) this undertaking works. Since last fall, when my UW-W book-club read Nicolas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” I have given much thought to “social reading” – that is, how people read books, and how using web-connected / and social-media-connected e-books can help readers create reading communities: share their impressions and comments, and also get insights from other reader’s (or event author’s) contributions (notes, highlights, questions, clarifications). Ironically, this is way of “social” reading is not really new – this is pretty much how books were read hundreds of years ago, before print was invented.
Back in my teaching days, when I taught medieval / early modern Spanish lit. course, one of my favorite required readings I assigned was a chapter from “The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture” by John Dagenais – a brilliant, insightful overview of “social reading” practices in the pre-print era, with a reach that goes well beyond the very specific text it studies (El Libro de Buen Amor). So, I plan to follow this 21-century experiment in social reading with keen interest. Sounds like fun. Sounds like a perfect summer adventure at the intersection of reading and technology.
BTW: Here is my favorite quote from John Dagenais (the whole book is available for free from Scribd):
I found that the medieval literature I had been studying till then — the medieval literature based on “texts” and an established canon of authors—was not the same medieval literature I encountered in the manuscripts. The medieval literature I found was far more fluid and dynamic. It had rough edges, not the clean, carefully pruned lines of critical editions; and these edges were filled with dialogue about the text —glosses, marginal notes, pointing hands, illuminations. I began to see that it is at the edges of manuscripts and in the various activities by which medieval people transformed one manuscript into another— commentary, translation, adaptation, reworking, and the “mechanical” act of copying — that the most important part of “medieval literature” happens.” (Preface, p. xvi)Filed under: ePubs, iPadExplainer.com, iPhoneExplainer.com, Social Media Tagged: Featured
