ReadWriteWeb

A rather grim story in The New York Times last month posited that our move to digital literature would spell the end of marginalia, the notes and comments that we scribble in the margins of printed books. How would we know what snarky comments Mark Twain left in the margins of his library had he only read books on his Kindle?

I'm not sure that the future of marginalia is quite so dim. Nor do the folks at ReadSocial, who are working on an API that would, as the name suggests, help open up our digital annotations to others and help make e-reading social.

ReadSocial's API aims to provide a social layer that works on top of and across reading systems. In other words, it means that passages from books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and so on can be excerpted, annotated, and pushed to our social networks. The API would serve to free content and discussions from being siloed in a single platform

BookGlutton, a site launched in January 2008 to allow socially-enhanced online book reading, has just launched a nifty little widget. Now, blog and website owners can embed what amounts to a book club just about anywhere.

I tried it out on my own blog website (note to WordPress.com: please make it easier/possible for users to embed script widgets, kthx), and it's pretty tight. Once the user clicks the widget, they can read the book page by page, skip around chapters, chat about it with other cross-platform readers in a slide-out on the left, make comments (public or private) on specific passages in a slide-out on the right, and (for veteran BookGlutton users) even choose from a drop-down menu of groups for further reading.