The Chronicle of Higher Education - With 'Social Reading,' Books Become Places to Meet (excerpt) lyrics

Stephen Duncombe thought he knew what he was going to do with his time off. "It was my sabbatical year, and what you do during a sabbatical year is you sit down and write a book," said Mr. Duncombe, an a**ociate professor of media and culture at New York University. "I had a book planned, and I walked into a bookstore and thought, 'I can't do that.'" Instead of writing a conventional monograph, he decided to experiment, aiming to move toward "what a book might look like in the future, when it's not just something bound between two covers, and words on a page." The result of his sabbatical labors has just gone live. Called Open Utopia, it's a free, online version of Thomas More's Utopia that anyone can browse—and annotate. An example of what's sometimes called social reading, Open Utopia builds on the idea that a book doesn't have to be a static text. Online, a book can be a gathering place, a shared space where readers record their reactions and conversations. Those interactions ultimately become part of the book too, a kind of amplified marginalia. "We live in a world where people can talk back to their books," Mr. Duncombe told me. More's cla**ic work, published in Latin in 1516, explores what a perfect society might look like. It's been a staple of political philosophy for almost five centuries. A co-founder of the independent Center for Artistic Activism, Mr. Duncombe works with activists on how to use aesthetics to bring people to their cause. A couple of years ago, he traveled to Moscow to teach a Fulbright seminar on the political imagination. To prepare, he revisited Utopia. "I read a completely different book than I remembered," he said. "I think it's because I was reading it in the context of the failed utopia of the Soviet Union." That got him thinking about what More was really trying to do. For 500 years, readers have been debating the question "Is More serious or is he not serious?" Mr. Duncombe said. "I think they're missing the point." In his view, More is arguing that "if you want a new world, you're going to have to imagine it yourself." More's text seemed like a good place to start reimagining. As a starting point, Mr. Duncombe used a free translation available on the Project Gutenberg Web site. He asked colleagues to help translate additional material not already in the public domain. The NYU scholar did fresh footnotes. He used Kickstarter to ask strangers for donations—bringing in about $4,500 to cover Web hosting, design, and other expenses. Mr. Duncombe published the results online using CommentPress, open-source software by the Institute for the Future of the Book. Online discussion and commenting is made possible by Social Book, a social-reading platform created by the institute. Bob Stein, its founder, has been a vocal proponent of social reading for texts of all lengths. Open Utopia is one of several pilot projects now in progress. Social Book appealed to Mr. Duncombe because it aims to "create communities of people talking to each other." In addition to serving as editor, sometime translator, and de facto publisher, Mr. Duncombe also did the early technical work himself. "I'm not a technical wiz at all, but I put together the first version of it myself," he told me. "These are tools that are well within the grasp of a literature professor or, in my case, a sociologist."