Two recent innovations for the digital conversation within electronic books.
In his column, One More Thing, Baratunde Thurston proposes:
What if you could download books that had been pre-annotated? I would pay extra to read Freakonomics with commentary by Paul Krugman,The New Jim Crow with notes from editors at The Nation, or the Bible annotated by the creators of South Park. A book could always inspire new layers of meaning, but now it can host that inspiration and a slew of associated conversations.
A form of this has already started, however, on the site RapGenius.com which posts user annotated song lyrics. They’ve started a project to get authors to annotate parts of their books. First up is Adam Mansbach explaining Chapter One of his recent book Rage is Back.