Books & Media
Helping Booklovers Unite
People living far from their literary friends now have a way to read, and discuss, books together in real time
nsr236@nyu.edu
Bookworms are getting down with the Internet. With the rise of reading-themed networking sites like LibraryThing, GoodReads and Shelfari—which collectively claim over 2 million users—avid readers worldwide can catalogue their favorite books, share recommendations and flirt with fellow bibliophiles. Yet until recently, reading itself remained a solitary pursuit: you could share your thoughts about a book once you’d finished it, but couldn’t share the book itself. That’s where the new website BookGlutton comes in.
Once you select a title from BookGlutton’s roughly 300-work catalogue, the document that opens looks like a regular book, with drop caps, pretty titles, wide margins and the like. It’s a much more pleasant way to read a novel online than, say, on an ungainly PDF.
“Paper books are pretty,” said Travis Alber, who founded the site with her husband Aaron Miller. “There’s no reason digital books shouldn’t be, either.”
Alber and Miller came up with the idea for the site after leaving San Francisco for Miller’s hometown of Champaign, IL. The former English majors, who met 11 years ago in a master’s program on interactive multimedia, didn’t know many book-loving locals in their new neighborhood. They wanted to find a way to share books with their far-flung friends, beyond just swapping questions or trading reviews.
“We needed to talk, and look at the book, just like you would in a physical book club,” Alber said. They spent less than $20,000 (of their own money) developing the site, and put in a year of “sweat equity,” before the site went live in January 2008.
It’s free, and requires no special software, a boon to school groups and neighborhood book groups alike. A built-in device called the Unbound Reader turns reading into a collective experience, via panels to the left and right of the text. Users can discuss the book in real time via a chat window, and leave either public or private annotations. (Those scared of spoilers can restrict their conversations to people currently viewing the same chapter.)
For example, reader T BOITO has left helpful definitions of some of the more obscure vocabulary in Louis Joseph Vance’s 1921 detective story “Alias the Lone Wolf”: coruscant (“glittering, sparkling”), duenna (“chaperone”), yashmaks (“a veil concealing all of the face except the eyes”). Other annotations simply track readers’ responses—as user HTMLNERD, who opined that Pride and Prejudice’s fussy Mrs. Bennett is “annoying.” The more users join the site, the theory goes, the richer this marginalia becomes.
You can read a text by yourself and choose to keep the side panels closed. Or you can form a virtual book club and read a novel with a group of friends—or strangers—you meet with online at prearranged times. The Crazy Antediluvians, who list their collective interests as “ancient stories, fables, and stuff about genies,” were recently reading Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Russian Shorts is focusing on the stories of Pushkin, Gogol and Turgenev.
BookGlutton is still small, with about 5,000 registered users (and many more unregistered ones). Most communities are online affairs, but some have their roots in the physical world. Jessamyn Hatcher, a New York University literature professor, has created groups for each of her classes, and requires students to post weekly comments. Recently, her class was reading “King Lear.” (JENNY H on Lear’s shifty daughters: “The speeches that Regan and Goneril give are so eloquent and pretty, but it seems like their emphasis would be redundant if they actually did love their father in the first place.”)
“I love that my students are, in effect, writing all over the pages of Shakespeare together,” says Hatcher, who sees BookGlutton as a useful extension of the classroom, and a way of making her students see reading as an active process.
Some scholars might blanch at the idea of studying texts with such shaky provenances (most of the books come from Project Gutenberg, the public domain e-book collection produced by volunteers), but most readers will find the texts perfectly adequate.
An upload feature also encourages budding novelists to post their work, and offers them a chance to gather feedback. Down the road, BookGlutton hopes to offer a shopping cart function that will allow writers to charge for their work, Alber said. The company is also reaching out to established publishers in the hopes that it can begin offering paid contemporary content. In the meantime, lonely readers can click on E.M. Forster’s classic novel Howard’s End, and follow Forster’s immortal dictum: “Only connect.”
Former English majors Aaron Miller (left) and Travis Alber founded BookGlutton after leaving San Francisco for the midwest, partly as a way keep up book conversations with their far-flung friends.
Photo Courtesy of BookGlutton
An example of the Unbound Reader, designed to make online reading more attractive.
Photo courtesy of BookGlutton