Sharing is caring

Is this the future of reading? I recently read an article on Nytimes about a new company called SharedBook that lets readers add their own footnotes to books online. Comments really are pretty much everywhere these days (in newspaper articles, on review sites like Amazon.com, etc), to the point where a post/article almost seems naked without them. But do they work for books? I can imagine some books where they might work (SharedBook is testing the idea on a parenting book) but I think it be less suited to fiction.

For me, comments work when the writing is opinionated and argumentive (like a blog post on Nymag.com) but might not be as suited to the immersive act of reading a novel. For me, I have to treat the author as God to really get caught up in the story. I have to just accept that the main character is wearing a blue coat—if I stop to quibble over whether it should have been gray I’ll find myself losing track of the narrative.

Footnotes might be good for a second read though. You could read the book the first time around alone and then check out what other people said to say about the book during a second read.