While a new, more architecturally sound, more scalable version of our publishing prototype is being developed, the one that we demonstrated at the Digital Publishing Workshop in April is no longer available to be viewed. It is good news for the LCRM Project that we have received some inquiries about it. If you are curious to see similar functionality that allows commenting on books, you might take a look at the following:
–Django Book, which provides some of the technical framework for our future offering
http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/
–Yale Books Unbound, in partnership with the Institute for the Future of the Book
http://yupnet.org/home/
There are other experiments online with annotating books, but these are two of my favorites.
What appears to be different about the LCRM Project/UNC Press plans in comparison to other experiments with annotation is our emphasis on links to primary and secondary sources, including primary sources that might be provided by the author and digitized by the UNC Library or elsewhere for this purpose.
In other words, sometimes when an author approaches UNC Press with a completed book manuscript, he or she also has in hand a collection of primary sources that informed the book narrative. Sometimes the author will ask the Press, “Do you want any of these oral history tapes and document files?” Notwithstanding the rights issues and technological challenges, we would like to be able to say “Yes.” With the UNC Library fast becoming a major digitization center, there is the possibility of (1) ingesting the pieces that do not reside elsewhere into the Library as a collection; (2) making them available for viewing online; and (3) linking from the online book to the digital collection.
Another difference is our emphasis on substantial sidebar-style commentary—perhaps offering contextual information and pointing out research opportunities—that might be written by the author as well as other contributors. We are interested in the idea that the book might become even more useful, readable, and teachable because of the value added to it online. A community might build around the book, and it would take on new life, as opposed to the traditional model in which it might be said to become ossified as an artifact.
Of course we are also interested in the simple idea that such online activity might increase sales of the print version. (Having looked at Jay Hopler’s brilliant poetry collection A New Book of Common Days on the Yale site, I ordered a copy of the book, and that is not the first time that Open Access content led to my purchase of a p-edition!) Currently we are considering Open Access for portions of selected UNC Press books.
Ideally, what you’d like is for all the citations to be links to electronic versions of all the cited works, so that clicking on a citation would take you directly to the page cited. Hmm, this would require all books and articles to be open access…