Who owns the networked future of reading? The Readmill app shows how in future readers will be able to share their marginalia with others - and authors. But will corporate moneymaking come to dominate?

Damien Walter:

Some years ago, I stumbled on a battered copy of The Silence of the Lambs in a train carriage. It was during one of those lonely chunks of life when reading takes on a new importance, and I found a quite unexpected friend in that rather dark and worrisome tale. The anonymous former owner had doodled on and annotated the book before inexplicably abandoning it to its fate on public transport.

Amusing, insightful and often veering wildly from the actual text, this commentary entirely changed my reading of Thomas Harris's story of a serial murderer and obsessive police procedure. My anonymous guide was a university student, most likely a young woman, studying the book from a feminist perspective. Harris's novel is a superior police procedural, but still guilty of that genre's casual sexism, picked apart by my guide with glee.

I've often wished that I could talk to that anonymous commentator. Today, if they were using an e-reader, I might be able to. Readmill is an e-reading app that, on the surface at least, will be familiar to anyone who has read a Kindle book on their smartphone or tablet. But what makes this scrappy indie app a potential Amazon giant-killer is how Readmill helps readers - and writers - talk to each other.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 25, 2013 1:42 AM
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