Sunday’s New York Times has a piece on an interesting book experiment created by SharedBook, a reverse-publishing company whose motto is “Made any good books lately?”
In this very interesting and potentially groundbreaking experiment, readers will be allowed to chime in on three chapters of the parenting book Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children. SharedBook will offer the footnotes for sale, and all reader comments will remain unmoderated and unedited.
Mr. Bronson (Po Bronson, one of the book’s co-authors) said he liked the idea of the SharedBook experiment for the “Nurture Shock” chapters because he wanted to create a community of readers.
“They can have a granular discussion and find other people who are interested in having that discussion,” he said.
But he was not sure readers would want to buy an edition of compiled reader comments. It would depend on whether “the commentary is so high level that people would want to buy the SharedBook version,” he said.