Reading

3 interesting social reading sites

Reading for me is a solitary activity, I have to admit. But others like being members of reading groups and so on – and who am I to judge them?

I linked recently to an article on Gizmodo asking why ebooks are so much like paper books – in other words, why don’t they innovate with the form a bit more? Here’s three examples of sites or apps that take electronic reading in a more interesting and social direction.

Readmill

Readmill is a replacement for iBooks on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. It places a heavy emphasis on good design and typography and eschews some of Apple’s silly skeuomorphic tendencies. It also enables you to highlight passages while you read, and share them with your friends and followers – and your social group also helps you to discover new books to read.

Subtext

Subtext is a free iPad app that allows classroom groups to exchange ideas in the pages of digital texts. It’s designed for use in learning environments, and enables a tutor to add in quizzes and assignments too. Here’s a video to explain more:

Copia

Copia calls itself a “social ereading platform”. It allows you to make notes in the ‘margains’ of the ebook you are reading, and then to share them with friends and publish them in notebooks. It also features the ability to create reading groups, and have discussions about books which is rather neat.

Copia is available on the desktop or the Android and iOS mobile platforms.

Do you use any social reading apps or sites? Are they even necessary?

Some recent dead tree reading

Now and again I find time to read books about work-related stuff. Here are three I have been tucking into recently.

John Naughton is a hero of mine. His weekly column in The Observer is required reading, and A Brief History of the Future is a wonderful primer on the origins of the internet. His latest book is a treasure trove of information which works just as well for the net newbie as it does the veteran of the interwebs.

Another book, another hero. Now at innovation software firm Spigit, James Gardner was once of the DWP where he implemented the ‘Idea Street’ innovation prediction market. His Little Innovation Book is a marvellously concise introduction to innovating in big organisations, and in Sidestep and Twist he outline how the big, game-changing breakthroughs tend to be adaptations of existing ideas rather than anything genuinely new.

Euan Semple is one of the best bloggers on social software, and following from his work with the BBC a few years ago, he understands the frustrations of trying to implement new ways of working within corporate structures. Organisations Don’t Tweet… is a great introductory work, in which nonetheless I found loads of nuggets of inspiration and learning – as well as a few reminders of things I ought to know but had forgotten. Buy this book for your boss!

Scheming Virtuously: A Handbook for Public Servants

I love stuff like this.

Nick CNick Charney works in government in Canada, and is also a prolific and excellent blogger. He’s also pretty active on GovLoop, which is where I first came across him I think. Anyway, follow his stuff.

Nick has just published an ebook called Scheming Virtuously: A Handbook for Public Servants which is great reading.

It’s “a tactical guide for any public servant looking to make an impact. It offers practical advice on how to be innovative in the public service while managing your relationships and reputation.” Awesome!

I have embedded the document below, or for those whose employers don’t trust them, here’s the direct PDF download.

I mentioned to Nick that the style reminded me a little of Colin McKay’s wonderful (even after 3 years!) Secret Guide to Social Media in Large Organizations – and it turns out that document helped inspire Nick to write his guide. Good stuff.

Yay for Kindle

Amazon have just relaunched the Kindle e-reading device in the UK, with a new model, which looks rather spiffy.

Kindle

Mine is one of the old, white ones – but I still love it. The new one features a new layout which makes the device smaller overall but keeping the same sized screen. The Kindle now supports wifi, which is cool – mine can only use 3G networks.

As John Naughton writes in his Observer column on the subject:

In the end, however, it’s not hardware that matters, but the effectiveness of the overall system in which the device is embedded. That was the great lesson of the Apple iPod: although the hardware was lovely from the outset, it would never have had the impact it had without the link to iTunes software on the PC/Mac and thence to the iTunes store. Other companies had made nice MP3 players, but none had put together a seamless system for getting music from CDs or online retailers on to them. Apple did and the rest is history.

The evolution of the ebook business reveals the same kind of pattern. First up, in 2006, was Sony, with a beautifully crafted device that had one crippling drawback: the difficulty of getting stuff on to it. A year later, Amazon launched the first-generation Kindle, a device inferior to the Sony product in every respect save one: it had wireless connectivity to the Amazon online store, which meant that purchasing and downloading books on to the device was a breeze. After that, it was game over for Sony and, indeed, for all the other companies that had piled into the e-reader market.

There are a number of cool things about the Kindle, some of which are unique to it, some that aren’t. Here are my top three.

1. Instant books

As John points out in his article, the iTunes-like ability to buy books right away is remarkably powerful. It’s like the difference between ordering a CD online or downloading an MP3 – why wait a day for it to be delivered when you can have it now?

2. Social reading

One thing the Kindle allows you to do is to set bookmarks in your e-books, and also to annotate them with notes. In addition to this, you can also highlight passages to make sure you remember them.

A social layer has now been added to this, in that you can now see what other people who have that book on their Kindles have highlighted. It’s a bit like seeing how many other people have saved a web page in Delicious, and is very cool.

3. Syncing

As well as the Kindle e-reader device, Amazon make applications available for other hardware to read books on, including Mac, Windows, Android and iPhone. This enables you to download books to other devices and keep reading even when you don’t have your Kindle on you.

Most obviously useful for phones, the really great thing with the Kindle is the way that when you open a book in one of the apps, it opens on the last page you read on your Kindle. Likewise, when you then open the book on your Kindle, it catches up to where you got up to on the other device.

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