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Show me the data!
Last month, BookNet Canada (BNC) hosted its fifth annual tech forum, this year themed “Implementing digital: Putting the plan into practice”.
The folks at BNC always put together interesting programs, and they continue to draw a diverse book publishing audience. I particularly liked hearing from Patrick Brown, community manager at Goodreads, whose talk was titled “Reading is social: Building communities of readers online”.
Patrick’s talk reminded me of a Goodreads post that I had put aside about a month earlier. A member of the staff had mapped data sets that included member density, likelihood of reading Michael Pollan versus Stephaie Meyer, and reading differences across metropolitan areas.
From a statistical or a cartographic point of view, the post is not exactly pristine. However, the maps illustrate the potential to learn much more about reading habits and reader engagement than ever before.
You can see that engagement in the comments. Readers applaud the illustrations and begin to offer their own ideas about what might be going on in various areas. The conversation underscores how we want to know more about how we are alike, as well as how much we differ.
A number of social-reading services have been launched in the last few years. These include Goodreads, BookGlutton, ReadSocialAPI, LibraryThing, weRead, Bookjetty and Shelfari, as well as the platform-driven offerings from Kobo and Copia. These sites remind me of the “convening power” of national associations.
Social reading sites offer their own “convening power”, gathering data about readers and books that no one member can acquire on his or her own. As data becomes even more readily available and open, it seems likely that the analysis will migrate from the sites to the members. That could be the tipping point for truly social reading.
Posted by Eric Hellman
Would it be fair to say that the social reading services show the importance of “context-last”?
Posted by Brian O'Leary
I don’t see that as natural conclusion. “Context first”, as outlined here earlier this week, implies conformance with standards, structuring and tagging content for discovery, trial and access, and working to anticipate and support multiple uses of content.
Those all fit well with social reading services, which can draw upon context to help members discover and use open content as a vehicle to promote, share and discuss. This seems wholly consistent with one of the themes in the original context-first post:
“The future of content involves giving readers access to the rules, tools and opportunities of contextually rich content, so that they can engage with it on their own terms.”
Posted by Brian O'Leary
Thank you for the link, Noah, as well as for the work everyone at BNC did to pull together such a good meeting.
Posted by Eric Hellman
But isn’t what these social reading services provide mostly a substrate for the growth of rich and multidimensional context, completely outside of the publishing process?
Metadata surely provides hooks for this rich context to attach to. A focus on building this “seed context” into a standard container during the publishing flow is what I’d like to see. Perhaps you’re saying the same thing.
Posted by Brian O'Leary
Additional (reader-driven) elements only get attached when the content is discoverable and open. Writing to a container and then adding title-level metadata (the current workflow) truncates or abandons much of the context that could have been there. This happens because we are writing and editing for a specific use-case (the container) and not evaluating our options more widely.