A couple of interesting experiments going on with blogs and books..
Dave Munger is taking the blog on a test drive as an ebook reader, putting together what he calls a “blook.” To show he means business, he’s chosen Moby Dick as the pilot text (but before starting, he’s working out formatting issues with Melville’s short story Bartleby, the Scrivener). I’m intrigued by the idea of using the blog form to generate discussion of a text – breaking it up into serial posts, jotting notes and analysis in the comment stream. It could make for a nice communal reading experience, as in a lit class, or virtual book club. It’s a game: drop the book in the blog and it ripples; different subjective worlds (of the readers) converge and collide. It’s very suggestive to combine this most conversational of media with the frozen, linear novel. For solitary reading, however, I’m not convinced that this would be a useful format.
Spark Armada, a “digital lifestyle, social software, creativity and science fiction conversation hub” in Israel, recently kicked off the “Keyboard” project, inviting bloggers to post stories on their sites that will be considered for inclusion in a print anthology. The idea seems to be to use the blogosphere’s mode of interwoven conversation as a way to generate creative work. The endpoint may be a conventional printed object, but Keyboard is interested in taking a different route in getting there.
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
More Moby Blook stuff
The design is getting closer and closer to what I’m looking for. I’ve gotten the sidebar to look pretty good, and even figured out how to automatically generate a table of contents (sort of pointless for a short story). The t of c project really reache…
The blook result may be equivalent to an affectation of the manuscript era when content of the classics was presented with contemporary commentaries in the margins. The increasingly corrupting and disrupting commentaries were only purged in the 16th century when classic texts appeared in print, less their medieval commentaries.
If only Dave had positioned blogs between books, I would be more interested in blooks. What the multiple screen/print interaction needs is a new mediary format that captures the cogitations on the relations and implications of separate works.
There is no autonomous book and there is no autonomous blog. Moby Dick cannot be the first and last book that a reader considers. Instead the reader excerpts this work from the library and understands it in a context with other books. That phenomenon deserves blogging. In fact there should be a blog between every book.
Gary, I agree with you that marginalia can be very distracting, especially when it’s imposed on the reader from some other source. I’d actually like to implement a feature where individual readers can hide the comments so that they can see the blook “clean” on the first reading, adding their own comments only if they wish, and then finally seeing other readers’ comments.
In fact, one of the problems I see with traditional paper books is that when I go back to them years later, I find my own notes in the margins distracting. Fascinating, yes, and even embarrassing sometimes, but generally not useful any more.
Have you seen the 400 windmills project? Is this what you’re talking about when you speak of positioning “blogs between books”?
The White Whale always seems to surface for breath. How odd.