Book: A Futurist's Manifesto: A Collection of Essays from the Bleeding Edge of Publishing by Hugh McGuire & Brian O'Leary

Author:Hugh McGuire & Brian O'Leary [McGuire, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781449305598
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Published: 2011-10-21T04:00:00+00:00

We Are All Book Gluttons

In 2005, despite the rise of social networking, digital books on the Web were limited to free editions of public domain works, loaded as a single, scrolling text file. The reading interface usually consisted of the browser’s own scroll bars, the ability to share the URL of the book, and the customary contextual controls (right click for a menu of things you could do with the page or a range of text). As an experience, reading these books online was, in all cases, limited to what the browser itself offered.

There was no way to discuss the book in context, meaning as you looked at its pages. To us, it appeared as if all the people who cared about books online had casually flung them there in their rawest state. A few projects attempted to present them with sophistication, but by and large, it seemed none of the projects had put the kind of thought into creating those online forms that a web designer, developer, or information architect would have developed. And meanwhile, the rest of the Web, including other forms of older media like audio and video, was benefiting from the careful attention of a decade of thought about reflowable layout, digital typography, visual design, and user experience.

There were very few online reading options for books then, and those that existed weren’t benefiting at all from being on the Web. To us, it seemed that the Web offered endless possibilities for a new kind of reading experience, something that was not possible offline, and not possible with printed books, but truly native to the way people already used the Web. An idea emerged, over the proverbial cocktail napkin and a round of bourbon, at a local spot in Champaign, Illinois. The basic concept was a web-based reading system that could connect people anywhere and let them discuss parts of a book as they looked at its pages together. It would preserve many things we loved about books, such as the importance of page layout, margins, readable type, but it would add what we liked about the Web: connections to other readers, a sense of communal experience, a window into other people’s reactions, the chance to respond or add our own thoughts.

Being web developers, we did what web developers do when something doesn’t exist and they have some time: we built it. In October of 2006, we began wireframing what would come to be called BookGlutton, a site that aggregated books and allowed unlimited consumption of them, with others, all in the browser. At the time, the social web that we know today was just taking hold. MySpace was the dominant social network, with Orkut and Friendster following. Facebook had opened to non-students in September 2006, and Twitter had been founded just two months earlier, in July 2006.

In January of 2008, we launched the first public version of BookGlutton.com. At the time, no other website, service, or device combined access to book people with access to book content.

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