Some years ago, I stumbled on a battered copy of The Silence of the Lambs in a train carriage. It was during one of those lonely chunks of life when reading takes on a new importance, and I found a quite unexpected friend in that rather dark and worrisome tale. The anonymous former owner had doodled on and annotated the book before inexplicably abandoning it to its fate on public transport.
Amusing, insightful and often veering wildly from the actual text, this commentary entirely changed my reading of Thomas Harris's story of a serial murderer and obsessive police procedure. My anonymous guide was a university student, most likely a young woman, studying the book from a feminist perspective. Harris's novel is a superior police procedural, but still guilty of that genre's casual sexism, picked apart by my guide with glee.
I've often wished that I could talk to that anonymous commentator. Today, if they were using an e-reader, I might be able to. Readmill is an e-reading app that, on the surface at least, will be familiar to anyone who has read a Kindle book on their smartphone or tablet. But what makes this scrappy indie app a potential Amazon giant-killer is how Readmill helps readers – and writers – talk to each other.
Amazon's Kindle platform lets readers see which sections of a text have been underlined most frequently: a frustratingly vacuous feature given what the Kindle platform could achieve, but one that networks its millions of readers. Amazon has gone as far as to purchase Goodreads, the largest social network for readers, but shows no sign of integrating its potential into its ebooks. And as a proprietary platform, the Kindle is unlikely to ever truly embrace the power of networks.
Readmill aims to fulfil the potential of networked reading. Readers can underline and comment on a text to their heart's content, then open up those comments for discussion among a growing community of passionate readers. It's a simple but powerful feature that, combined with Readmill's open platform, could give it the edge to dethrone Amazon's proprietary Kindle technology.
But this is only the leading edge of the networked reading revolution. Readmill allows authors to claim ownership of their books, and interact with readers in the margins of the text. So not only could I and my anonymous commentator debate the feminist critique of The Silence of the Lambs but, should he feel so inspired, Thomas Harris himself could respond, in a conversation directly related to the text itself.
To understand what a fully realised network reading experience might mean, imagine reading a book published in 2013 in the year 2063. In the 50 years between now and then, dozens of critical texts, hundreds of articles, thousands of reviews and hundreds of thousands of comments will have been made on the text. In a fully networked reading experience, all of those will be available to the reader of the book from within the text.
Authors are able to shape the discussion on their books, moderating comments in a system similar to a blogpost. They can maintain a relationship with all the readers who have enjoyed their books, be that a few dozen or a few hundred million. And perhaps most interesting of all, readers can find each other through the books they read. In a world of seven billion people, the ability to find like minds has incalculable value.
Of course, at a time when data privacy dominates the headlines, the question is: who owns the networked future of reading? Publishers might assume they do, but their failure to lead these innovations puts them at risk of becoming redundant. Amazon and the tech behemoths seem unstoppable. If that's true, we face a future where every book and every comment about it is owned, and profited from, by a handful of major corporations.
Readmill and other indie developers might yet deliver the future of reading back in to the hands of readers and writers. But if this utopian ideal is to become a reality, we're going to have to rethink what it means to own a book, or any kind of information, even if you created it. Issues such as piracy and filesharing suggest the principle of ownership and the highest potential of our information revolution are not compatible. Perhaps the networked future of reading belongs to no one, and hence to everyone.