With the pleasures of solitary reading under attack by social reading websites and book clubs, Last Gasp Productions is pitching a new reality show, Meet the Readers.
Reality shows are only nominally about their subject. They are mini-dramas, each episode with something at stake and intra-group conflict that will be resolved - for the time being - by story’s end.
The premise for Meet the Readers is deceptively simple: A disparate group of book lovers is marooned in Malibu, forced to live together in a small, cozy villa overlooking the Pacific, the washer and dryer kaput. The group is a mix of two teens, two young adults, two middle-agers, and two seniors.
Watch the pages fan fast and furiously as the house-and-reading mates try to decide on a book to read in common! The Great Responsive Reading Fiasco! When 17 year-old Stan Marks and 87 year-old Selma Disckind bridge their seventy-year age difference to conspire against Marla, a 26 year old model and aspiring porn actress, and Bill, an accountant with an unrequited passion for romance novels! Stan and Selma sneaking off together for a private reading session on the beach, dos-à-dos!
Watch this book club with a reading problem transform before your very eyes into a booze club with a drinking problem. See body scans and strip-searches for hidden weapons i.e. razor-edged bookmarks, miniature books fashioned into kohga ninja throwing stars, and cat’s eye-framed reading glasses, corners sharpened to deadly points.
Each week, viewers can see for themselves that book readers, far from being passive, socially awkward geeks, are, in reality (at least, this reality) fiercely ambitious, social-climbing, active participants in this thing we call Life - as we understand it on television.
Loathe though I am to give away the ending for the first season, I must lest my head explode: A battle-royal occurs, and Denise, the lonely and dizzy real estate agent with an unquenchable thirst for self-help books, is the last reader standing - in a cozy nook, all by herself, a copy of Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War in one hand, a dirty martini in the other, and a Cheshire Cat smile on her face.
Auditions for next season are currently in progress. Aspiring TV-readers will be asked, “What would you do if you had to read Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey while waiting for the anti-depressants to kick in?”
Suicide, my inside source tells me, is the optimal answer, with huge potential for dramatic jeopardy; must-see TV at its finest. Slit your wrist, you're in.
Showing posts with label Social Reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Reading. Show all posts
Friday, February 5, 2010
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Help Wanted: Professional Reader
To provide cogent, erudite and insightful marginalia to digital books and thus help foster social reading. Must be able to read in a crowd and accept potentially constant input and distraction. Digital sociability a must; digital loners, misfits, hermits, screwballs need not apply.
As Clive Thompson writes in The Future of Reading in the Digital World in this month’s issue of Wired, “We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading…Books have a centuries-old tradition of annotation and commentary, ranging from the Talmud and scholarly criticism to book clubs and marginalia.”
Bob Stein, director the Institute for the Future of the Book, recently posted Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) online with a sleek commenting system, then hired seven writers to collaboratively read it and provide notes. “Stein believes that if books were set free digitally, it could produce a class of ‘professional readers,’” Thompson writes, “people so insightful that you'd pay to download their footnotes. Sound unlikely? It already exists in the real world: Microsoft researcher Cathy Marshall has found that university students carefully study used textbooks before buying them, because they want to acquire the smartest notes.”
Thompson relates the story of McKenzie Wark, who wrote Gamer Theory (2007), an analysis of why people enjoy playing videogames, that Harvard University Press published in hardcover. Wark, however, published it online using CommentPress, "an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation." The free blog theme opened the book into a series of reader-book/reader-to-reader interactions, with every paragraph potentially spawning its own discussion forum for the readers.
“Sure enough, hundreds dove in, and pretty soon Gamer Theory had sparked erudite exchanges on everything from Plato's cave to Schopenhauer's ideas on boredom. It felt as much like a rangy, excited Twitter conversation as it did a book. ‘It was all because we opened it up and gave readers a way to interact with each other,’ Wark says. ‘It changed the way they read the book.’"
Digital books could, conceivably, have a URL for every chapter, paragraph, sentence. “Readers could point to their favorite sections in a MySpace update or instant message or respond to an argument by copiously linking to the smartest passages in a recent best seller,” Thompson notes.
The technology is available for digital publishers to link to Facebook or Twitter to facilitate the creation of digital book clubs devoted to a single book with links to every online reference to the book, author, content, and beyond to other books or virtually anything related. The immediately apparent advantage to this over a real-world book club is that you’d only read what you truly want, rather than books chosen by other group members who may not share your tastes.
For all the buzz about it, however, "social reading" seems like an oxymoron. For most of us, reading has always been a private and solitary activity, a way to not only learn, intimately interact with the author and our own thoughts but to deeply focus, become lost in the book and, for awhile at least, escape the boundaries of temporal existence. The act of reading is deeply layered and much more than the simple acquisition of information. While I’d enjoy listening to my friends’ thoughts about a particular book, I don’t want to be interrupted until I’m finished with not just the reading but the thinking and feeling about it.
This all reminds me of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the classic show’s sometimes rude, often sarcastic, always hilarious voice-over running commentary from the peanut gallery that accompanied the worst sci-fi movies ever made. It was a great formula for watching lousy movies but would have been a horrible one for good films - and pointless; no one likes a chatty-Cathy circus in a movie theater. The darkened theater of a book is, however, apparently another matter: "This Theater Available for Conferences and Meetings."
On its face, "professional reader" sounds like a dream job. Perhaps in this context it would be. But in the late 1970s I worked as a "story analyst" aka "reader" for a major TV and film production company and had to read and analyze every book and screenplay thrown my way. Many if not most of them were only suitable only to be thrown. Hell is being paid to read but only crap.
I do not anticipate curling up in bed at night with a souped-up, maximized content social Kindle any time soon. I don't know about you but I don't want a crowd with me in the sack for any reason much less reading company. Albert, my companion of thirty-four years and most successful LTR, is about all I can tolerate. Albert is a Yellow-Naped Amazon parrot. When he isn't attempting to eat whatever book I'm reading, he quietly sits on my shoulder. And though he has the ability for verbal self-expression, he thankfully keeps his comments to himself.
__________
As Clive Thompson writes in The Future of Reading in the Digital World in this month’s issue of Wired, “We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading…Books have a centuries-old tradition of annotation and commentary, ranging from the Talmud and scholarly criticism to book clubs and marginalia.”
Bob Stein, director the Institute for the Future of the Book, recently posted Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) online with a sleek commenting system, then hired seven writers to collaboratively read it and provide notes. “Stein believes that if books were set free digitally, it could produce a class of ‘professional readers,’” Thompson writes, “people so insightful that you'd pay to download their footnotes. Sound unlikely? It already exists in the real world: Microsoft researcher Cathy Marshall has found that university students carefully study used textbooks before buying them, because they want to acquire the smartest notes.”
Thompson relates the story of McKenzie Wark, who wrote Gamer Theory (2007), an analysis of why people enjoy playing videogames, that Harvard University Press published in hardcover. Wark, however, published it online using CommentPress, "an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation." The free blog theme opened the book into a series of reader-book/reader-to-reader interactions, with every paragraph potentially spawning its own discussion forum for the readers.
“Sure enough, hundreds dove in, and pretty soon Gamer Theory had sparked erudite exchanges on everything from Plato's cave to Schopenhauer's ideas on boredom. It felt as much like a rangy, excited Twitter conversation as it did a book. ‘It was all because we opened it up and gave readers a way to interact with each other,’ Wark says. ‘It changed the way they read the book.’"
Digital books could, conceivably, have a URL for every chapter, paragraph, sentence. “Readers could point to their favorite sections in a MySpace update or instant message or respond to an argument by copiously linking to the smartest passages in a recent best seller,” Thompson notes.
The technology is available for digital publishers to link to Facebook or Twitter to facilitate the creation of digital book clubs devoted to a single book with links to every online reference to the book, author, content, and beyond to other books or virtually anything related. The immediately apparent advantage to this over a real-world book club is that you’d only read what you truly want, rather than books chosen by other group members who may not share your tastes.
For all the buzz about it, however, "social reading" seems like an oxymoron. For most of us, reading has always been a private and solitary activity, a way to not only learn, intimately interact with the author and our own thoughts but to deeply focus, become lost in the book and, for awhile at least, escape the boundaries of temporal existence. The act of reading is deeply layered and much more than the simple acquisition of information. While I’d enjoy listening to my friends’ thoughts about a particular book, I don’t want to be interrupted until I’m finished with not just the reading but the thinking and feeling about it.
This all reminds me of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the classic show’s sometimes rude, often sarcastic, always hilarious voice-over running commentary from the peanut gallery that accompanied the worst sci-fi movies ever made. It was a great formula for watching lousy movies but would have been a horrible one for good films - and pointless; no one likes a chatty-Cathy circus in a movie theater. The darkened theater of a book is, however, apparently another matter: "This Theater Available for Conferences and Meetings."
On its face, "professional reader" sounds like a dream job. Perhaps in this context it would be. But in the late 1970s I worked as a "story analyst" aka "reader" for a major TV and film production company and had to read and analyze every book and screenplay thrown my way. Many if not most of them were only suitable only to be thrown. Hell is being paid to read but only crap.
I do not anticipate curling up in bed at night with a souped-up, maximized content social Kindle any time soon. I don't know about you but I don't want a crowd with me in the sack for any reason much less reading company. Albert, my companion of thirty-four years and most successful LTR, is about all I can tolerate. Albert is a Yellow-Naped Amazon parrot. When he isn't attempting to eat whatever book I'm reading, he quietly sits on my shoulder. And though he has the ability for verbal self-expression, he thankfully keeps his comments to himself.
__________
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