Not that I’m all that interested in this feature — though it does have potential for the future, as I’ll explain — but apparently highlighting in the Kindle can be tracked by Amazon, and you can have some of those highlights show up in your local version of the book as well, on your own Kindle.
I’m normally fairly against things like Twitter, endless Facebook status updates, and so on, just because I think they add noise without content to an already cacophonous communications environment. Nevertheless, I think this is a great first step towards a more social reading experience, something I’d actually be really interested in using.
I’m guessing Amazon or some enterprising social network developer already has plans for this, but here’s what I’d like to see in the next few months:
- You have an option on the Kindle and its associated apps, to send the relevant information to Amazon when you highlight or annotate a book. Yeah, that feature’s already in place, but I don’t know if there’s an opt-out yet.
- Amazon has either: further developed their own social network ("Friends and Interesting People"), or partnered with someone (ostensibly Facebook would be the best partner for this) to provide a social framework and userbase for them.
- You then have an option in the Kindle software/app to display: a) Top comments, b) Comments from your friends, c) Comments from selected friends, or d) No comments. I don’t know how the Kindle handles annotations yet, but hopefully they’ll come in unobtrusively, like a footnote.
While I generally don’t like things messing with me while I’m reading, I can think of certain books I’d like to see my friends’ opinions on, and a few people whose opinions I’d certainly like to read (Charlotte, Tishna, etc, I’m looking at you guys).
Even if the literary overlaps I have with my friends are minimal, it basically turns every installation of Kindle software into a portable book club, without the bad wine, crudité platters, and having to listen to the endless cat stories of the guy who invited himself.
Just for clarification, I’ve never been a member of a book club, but I still have pretty negative conceptions about them.
Anyway, this feature would give people new communities to join within the literary field; instead of just adding a "Libraries" app to your Facebook or Amazon Social page, you could join content-oriented groups to get relevant annotations.
Nobody you know is reading that new scifi novel? No problem, just load up the Slashdot book club’s comments. Paging through some physics textbook and not getting some context? Join an AP&M group to see what you’re missing.
And of course, when it comes to monetization, that shouldn’t be too challenging… there’s always additional ad revenue from more social network page views, and you can pay authors and/or celebrities to add their own annotations, and charge an extra buck or two to download them, or have for-pay subscriptions to those special groups.
For me it’s a no-brainer, and I’m surprised there isn’t more noise around the Net on this already. It builds on their existing technologies, it’s something that would resonate both with technophiles and reading purists, and it has two profit vectors; advertising revenue from the social network(s) and payments for premium content.
And it turns every single book on Amazon into a wiki of itself.
Personally I can’t wait until I can see this in action… I just hope they don’t mess up the implementation with format standards and DRM squabbles.