NPR talks with Travis Alber of BookGlutton: ‘Chat while reading: The future of books?’
I’ve been pestering the IDPF to do shared annotations or at least pick up others’ standards in this area.
And if there can be instant chat, then so much the better.
Well, even if the standards group isn’t paying sufficient attention to the importance of interactivity, others are starting to—notably, National Public Radio.
NPR’s Laura Sydell interviewed Travis Alber of BookGlutton. An excerpt from the text version:
Reading a book evokes solitary images of lying in bed late at night or sitting beneath a beach umbrella lost in a fantasy. But BookGllutton,, a Web site that permits readers to chat about books as they read, may be transforming a lone activity into a communal one.
The site was born out of co-founder Travis Alber’s desire to talk about books with friends who had moved away. Her solution? A Web site that allows multiple users to write in the margins of an online book.
"You can chat inside any chapter of the book, or you can click on any paragraph and attach a comment to it, and someone else can come past that point in the book later and respond," she says.
The site has been getting a lot of interest from teachers, including New York University English professor Jessamyn Hatcher, who asked her class to use BookGlutton to read King Lear...
BookGlutton is still a fairly small site, with about 1,500 public domain books and 120,000 readers a month. But the site’s founders are already having conversations with publishers that would expand their online library to include newly released books.
Congrats, Travis, on the well-deserved fame. And don’t forget that we knew you way back when.
Related: BookGlutton teams with Random House for promotion, in Publisher’s Weekly, as well as Kat Meyer’s interview with Travis.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
I would find it very distracting… when I read a book, I hate being disturbed even by people I know (and love) – not to mention all various unknown margin-writers from the net. Sorry, it is not going to be a killer feature for me, definitely not.