Xandra Gregory

Found this waiting in my queue for pending comments this morning:

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blog.bookglutton.com/?p=42
greatdeals209@xxxxx.xxx

Submitted on 2009/03/08 at 12:26am

Keep up the great work, I love your posts

Now aside from the fact that “greatdeals209″ couldn’t be spammier if it lightly fried itself and hopped on a plate with an over-easy egg, the URL actually seemed relevant. Of course, I’ve been tricked before, so I held my breath and clicked, hoping “bookglutton” wouldn’t turn out to be a dummy blog for any one of a number of magic solutions for small packages (ahem!).

Turns out BookGlutton is a form of social networking site that essentially revolves around live-blogging books, sorta. Reading groups have an e-text and annotate right on the text as they are reading. I joined, because there’s an Austen group and one of my goals for this year is to read and/or re-read Jane Austen without the pressure of “ZOMG test on Friday!” or the more subtle pressure of crafting my answer to fit the teacher’s expectations, or the irritation of stopping every other page to remind myself that I’m reading for an assignment and can’t just get lost in the book.

The site itself isn’t badly designed–not garish with ads, but rather like a facebook-y setup. You can search by title, user, or group. The neat and useful raison d’etre of the site is the online reader–it’s got a pleasing appearance that fits the screen, with page navigation buttons at the bottom on either side of a progress bar, text resize, a “pocket/pop-up” guide to the reader on the right, and a chapter jump on the left. There’s a top right “Save and Visit Site” that marks where you left off, if you want to close the book and return to the social networking site’s page. But the real beautiy are the left and right sliders along the edges of the “page” that allow you to pull up either live chat on the book (left), or on-the-fly annotations for the text (right).

I will warn you that signup leads you to one of those “invite your friends” things where you log into google and it hijacks your contacts list, so be aware of that before you automatically click.

I also sent them an email through their contact form, asking more, which I will share here. Because it wasn’t quite clear as to how Book Glutton obtained their right to use the author’s work. So far, it doesn’t appear to be a problem–all the stuff in my browsing appeared to be public domain. But since I (and every other author I know) would like for people to read and discuss my books, I thought I’d better ask ‘em how they handle works with copyright still present.

Hi,
Your blog runner hit my blog and since you actually seemed relevant, I decided to investigate. BookGlutton sounds like a new way to blend social networking and reading. I’m interested in learning more, particularly for the authorial side of things.

Can you share with me a little bit more about how you handle licensing and copyright from content creators, or your future plans to do so? Current books appear to be mostly public domain classics. What would be the benefit for an author with a copyrighted work in print to use Book Glutton (and how would that work)?

I’m part of an extensive community of romance readers and writers online, and I’d like to share this information with them. If I understand correctly how BookGlutton is supposed to work, it sounds like a new and interesting way to take advantage of digital connectivity and the social aspects of reading. The community would like to hear more.

Thanks for your time.
Xandra Gregory
www.xandragregory.com

I’ll let y’all know what I find out.

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This entry was posted by Xandra on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 10:15 am and is filed under An Author's Life, Publishing, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.