Quote:
Originally Posted by CWatkinsNash
I only said that it's the aspect that's touted by companies that offer what they call social reading. You'll note that those features are the one mentioned in the OP, so I'm not alone in perceiving this. Caleb quoted http://www.openbookmarks.org/social-reading/ on the previous page. Kobo's Reading Life sounds like Four Square for books. Kindle might have started the highlighting / notes thing, but they certainly aren't alone in defining this type of activity as "social reading". A MR user recently spammed links to another, I think it was called readmill or something like that.
My point was that some of us don't see social reading that way. We're not in disagreement on that - I don't think that these things are the core of what I think of as social reading, but it is what is often advertised as social reading. |
It seems like you're right and I've just been less exposed to that kind of marketing.
I hope that the division between what is advertised as social and what is truly social doesn't lead us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The complaints about social reading sullying a pure reading experience earlier in this thread remind me of nothing so much as paper book purists who complain about ebooks doing the same thing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Highlights and notes are what's being pushed by the sites/apps that offer "social reading." Some sites, like Goodreads, have open discussion on each title... with the result that popular titles have several thousand comments/"reviews" and there's no easy way to have a discussion with a handful of like-minded people. The best way to do "social reading" would probably be a chatroom per title, and more chatrooms for collections of titles; the server load would be ridiculous even if it were only "those titles being discussed right this minute." (Would the chats be archived? Would archives of discussions make sense? Who would moderate?)
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I use Goodreads quite a lot and still consider it a failure. Its design clearly betrays its origins as a service for creating an online catalogue of books, rather than as a place to discuss reading with friends and like-minded people. The decision to organize reviews in the manner of article comments, with the "best" comments ranked at the top of the list according to an opaque algorithm, not only stifles exchange but fails to create any kind of sustained community.
Few forms of interaction online can equal the message board, in my opinion.