Collaborative reading
Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is a rather wonderful experiment in collaborative reading; an elegant pairing of Wordpress and Vanilla, blended with an important literary text and a clique of literary critics collaboratively reading, and passing comment page by page.
I've been meaning to write about this for a few weeks, but keep putting it off, in the hope that I'll set enough time aside to write some huge polemic about this wonderful idea. Fat chance. So here's a bunch of links and a half-baked idea...
The project was commissioned by the intriguing Institute for the Future of the Book, who smartly commissioned Apt, who are even smarter as they're working with James Bridle whose ideas and projects I follow closely.
The project is a really interesting way to develop ideas contained within that archetypal idea container, the book.
I'm not much one for literary criticism (or rather, I'd prefer to read the whole novel and then perhaps return to this forum), but I would love to read a non-fiction book, say, The Black Swan, as a first pass within this sort of collaborative reading environment - it would really enhance the initial reading of that text (collaborative footnotes, basically). I read Black Swan along with an iphone; looking up ideas, philosophers and checking out footnotes from almost every page, so densely packed is it with ideas that I wanted to understand more about before continuing to the next page.
And although Black Swan has a more narrative structure than many books of its genre, the stop-start reading experience of thinking about the ideas, and looking up clarifications didn't detract from the reading experience, whereas for a novel, I'm not sure I'd like that initial reading experience. To be fair, the site urges you to purchase the physical novel; but the point I'm trying to make is that for those 'Gladwell-esque' books that seem to dominate the non-fiction charts, the collaborative, extended reading experience offered by the Golden Notebook experiment is pretty damn near perfect.
As the project is built on Wordpress and Vanilla (and is clearly heavily and very well customised), and is principally funded by the Arts Council, I wonder if the software has any chance of being publicly released as Open Source? Imagine the potential of classic Economics and Philosophy texts applied to within this context.
The IFtB were involved in another rather nifty collaborative reading project, CommentPress (download has died, unfortunately), which certainly had the seeds of the Golden Notebook project, but was more focused on paragraph level commenting, than a rich collaborative reading experience.
Forget Sony Readers and Kindles - a £150 netbook, a comfy char in a wifi connected cafe, and this sort of reading experience is an 'ebook' future I'm looking forward to.
