Books as Conversations

Historically, scribbling in page margins has been a solitary practice—one reader, one book. Annotated copies are sometimes shared, and every so often notes are collated and published, but by and large the page margin has functioned as a private mental space for the reader.

If the book is digital, however, and resides on a network, new possibilities begin to open up. The page margin can become a public space. Authors and readers can interact in close to real time. An entire classroom can operate inside a single text. Books can become conversations.

Over the past two years, the Institute for the Future of the Book has run a series of “networked book” experiments exploring the potential of blogs and other popular web apps to stimulate meaningful social interaction around and inside of long texts. In 2006 they published a web edition of a full rough draft of /Gamer Theory/, a monograph by renowned media studies scholar McKenzie Wark. To the right of each paragraph of the text were comment fields that were quickly populated by hundreds of postings from a diverse group of readers (including Wark himself)—a dynamic conversation alive in the margins of the book that ended up having significant impact on subsequent revisions.

Based on this success, and in order to make this functionality more widely available, the Institute developed CommentPress as an extension to the popular blogging software WordPress. Now anyone with a blog can set up a social reading environment with paragraph-level commenting around a text of their choosing. A number of fascinating projects are already underway. This session will tell the story of CommentPress and discuss its implications for education, academia, and publishing.