Child-rearing book from Hachette imprint will let you provide footnotes: Time for IDPF to care more about interactivity?

By David Rothman

What if Doctor Spock’s publishers had released his child-rearing guides with the ability for readers to insert comments into the books?

Imagine controversies between, say, lenient parents and disciplinarians.

Get set for this to become reality.

Readers of Nurture Shock: New Thinking about Children, from Twelve, a bestseller-focused imprint of Hachette, will be able to insert footnotes in SharedBook’s experiment. So reports the New York Times. A $2.00 PDF will pick up three chapters and the reader-created footnotes.

I don’t know how much latitude the editors will allow the opinionated. But I’m optimistic. Twelve won’t moderate, and the Times quotes Jonathan Karp, editor-publisher of Twelve: “We thought this would be a great way to go deep into the text and literally argue with it sentence by sentence, collectively.”

The actual interactivity will happen on the Web. But in the future, with the right tech in place, it will occur more and more inside the books themselves, at least “inside” as perceived by the readers. The material might in fact reside on servers.

Shared footnotes not just for e-book nerds

Shared interactivty, in general, needn’t be just for adventurous e-book mavens, academics and mixes of the two.

Civil discussion—photo is from a radio debate—is one of the best ways to guarantee that books explore all angles.

Some of the best information in the TeleRead blog comes from people disagreeing constructively with me and other regulars. The smarter publishers know that the same concept can apply to books.

In the next few years we’ll see interactivity catch on in various forms on for many kinds of titles. Child-rearing, with all the different ways of approaching it, is a perfect topic area. Fiction? Depends. You’re caught up inside the author’s story, so I’m not so sold on interactivity’s merits, except for, say, reader-written reviews and academic work. But you get the idea.

Technology will make interactivity easier and easier to include. Just this morning, I posted about a forthcoming Ukrainian E Ink machine that will let you use a Blue Tooth keyboard, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon tried something similar with a future Kindle so you didn’t have to mess around with those horrid chiclet keys.

Another warning for the IPDF slowpokes

Now the issue is whether the slow-poke IDPF can come up with appropriate standards for shared interactivity.

I’m not beating up on Mike Smith, the executive director.

Rather my frustration is with miserly publishers who so far have not advocated and financed the accelerated development of e-book standards for this to happen.

Let’s wait for Amazon to be there first, no? Who cares about publishers enjoying leverage against Amazon?

And speaking of the IDPF: When will we see that logo for ePub. Again and again I keep hearing it’s around the bend, but nothing happens.

Third image: CC-licensed photo from Silveira Neto.