By Motoko Rich at The New York Times:
Just reading a book is so old school.
The comments section on author blogs and on Amazon.com already permit readers to air their views, question an author’s premise or add their own knowledge to the content of a book.
Now, in an experiment developed by SharedBook, a company that designs customized books and allows readers to annotate documents online, the publisher of “Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children,” a book about parenting by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman that went on sale last week, is inviting readers to make notes on three chapters of the book.
Starting Sept. 14, chapters concerning praise for children (and why too much is not a good idea), the importance of an extra hour of sleep and the prevalence of lying among children, will be posted on PoBronson.com, Nurtureshock.com and Twelvebooks.com, the Web site of the book’s publisher, the imprint that released the book. Readers will be able to highlight a word, a sentence or a paragraph and add notes that will be integrated as footnotes on the text. More…