In recent years, many have tried to package the social networks for the final read , and Anobii Goodreads vie for center stage for several years, but if we look numbers, it is clear that the game of social reading is never really started.
Of course, thousands of users have registered to these social networks and discuss every day, leave comments, reviews and ratings, but the real breakthrough never happened. Social theorists suggest reading some time to develop a community of readers that interacts in real-time in the course of reading a book, exchanging opinions, notes, guidance and advice; the basic idea is to transform the digital readout in a kind of community event, as if the various users were all sitting around the same hearth, to read the same book and talk about swinging a glass of red wine.
After years of trying, no one has yet been able to realize such a scenario, even Amazon, which also boasts the most widely used device (Kindle), the most used social network for reading (Goodreads) as well as a huge reservoir of users. But some continue to hope.
This is the case of Glose , a new startup that has set itself the goal of making the experience of reading an e-book significantly different from reading of a paper book. Glose is a cross between a digital store ebook and a ‘ app for reading is available for iOS and web (short for Android), provides a catalog of over 300,000 titles of the major publishing houses and, above all, is designed to allow people who are reading the same book to interact with each other while reading.
Each user can comment and show parts of the ebook, and share these annotations with the whole community Glose. In this way, a user who wants to deal with others on a book he read (or plan to read) can access the different records, or choose to keep in touch with specific users who appreciates more notes.
Of course, such an approach does a lot more for the essays for fiction, but the ambition of the creators of Glose is to introduce a new way of reading, a kind of digital reincarnation of the book club.
For now, the app is still far from being fully functional. Some users complain about little versatility in the choice of fonts and font sizes, and also the most interesting feature, namely the ability to show automatically sentences with a single touch, has yet to be finalized.
But surely Glose is an interesting proposal, and it is possible that, even if it will not succeed as a stand-alone app, the companies that produce e-reader may have interest in integrate it into their devices (or to acquire it directly to avoid problems, real Amazon?).
There is the real possibility that the whole way that the goal of the developers is Glose are placed is not actually reachable. Although social reading is an interesting experiment, unlikely to have the same success of social listening or social watching .
To be clear: it was quite predictable that sooner or later users would use Twitter and its hashtags to comment on live TV shows or movies; This does not mean that the same should be done for reading, which is traditionally a ‘ mostly solitary activity , often linked to a moment of silence and isolation from the outside world.
In short, I do not know about you, but I when I read a book, the rest of the world I forget again.
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