I'm off on a several-week tangent from my original purpose of talking about free ebooks sites, I know, but I can only excuse myself by saying that I've had visitors, training for a new job, and an unexpected Eddie Izzard concert in the past few weeks and one-off posts are easier to write late at night! This is going to be another one-off (sort of), but I have hopes of returning to the "free ebooks" theme next week -- or possibly the week after.

A few weeks ago, I saw a link for a site called Copia. The original link I saw referenced the Copia ebooks reader and the website offers information on several different readers. Most of them look very spiffy and I'd love a chance to play with one. Copia advertises that all its readers offer storage space for up to 1,500 ebooks and some models come with an SD slot to add more memory -- up to 16 GB, apparently.

I don't think that the Copia system --as another ereader -- offers anything that revolutionary, but one aspect of it I found particularly intriguing: the "social networking."

Copia advertises itself as the "world's first social reading experience -- reading, learning, and sharing all in one." I don't know about this. It strikes me that the "world's first social reading experience" -- without counting libraries with reading rooms, reading for work purposes, or private experiences of reading within a family in which case the dates are probably skewed earlier -- was probably sometime in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries with the rise of coffee-house or salon culture in England and France and the active student culture in Europe. There's also an argument to be made about the rise of print culture -- around the same time -- as part of establishing a "social reading experience" because there simply weren't a lot of copies of things. A few copies had to make the rounds among more readers -- also part of the coffee-house/salon culture mentioned above. And printed material had to be read aloud to be shared with individuals who were interested but illiterate or partially literate. To say nothing of the difficulty of shipping printed material -- bulky, heavy, easy to damage -- from one place to another.

But I think the Copia system offers an interesting new twist on this in offering to link in existing social networks -- like Twitter, Facebook, or whathaveyou -- into the reading experience you have with the ereader. I think there's something like this going on, obviously, with the addition of reader reviews and comments to most online bookstore sites and the creation of sites like Goodreads or LibraryThing which allow users to discuss, rate, review, and even swap or sell copies of books. Both Goodreads and LibraryThing also link to commercial sites like Amazon. There's also another iteration of this in library websites that have become more Web 2.0-friendly by opening their sites to patron reviews and suggestions about specific items.

Taking all this into account, then, I think Copia might be an interesting attempt at uniting all this sort of user content in one place or at least in one device. I could see it possibly becoming unwieldy -- after all, that's a lot of content to juggle on one relatively small screen which would probably become an issue for me, at least -- and one catastrophic crash could see very frustrated users. But once the system is rolled out live, I'll be watching to see how it goes.

I'm appending here a list of the books from which I drew my comments about the earlier "social reading experience" in case anyone wishes to follow up on some background reading:

• Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. Illinois, USA: University of Chicago Press, 1957
• Adams, J.R.R. The Printed Word & the Common Man: Popular Culture in Ulster 1700-1900. Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, 1987.
• Sharpe, Kevin. Reading Revolution: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern Europe. Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2000.
• Stephenson, Neal. Quicksilver. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004.
• -----. The Confusion. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.