We all know it’s a brave new world out there when it comes to publishing – paper books, ebooks, pdfs; Kindles and iPads and Sony Readers… and dozens of new startups too, offering even newer and more exciting options for authors and readers alike. As the countdown to this year’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference in February approaches, the WWW team will be exploring recent start-ups with promise for authors, beginning with:

Book Glutton, a web-based reading platform that enables people to connect and chat about books, inside the books. Anyone can preview a sample section of a book and use the community features inside, which include chatting with others inside the chapter of the book or attaching margin notes to any paragraph. To access the whole book, users click a buy button embedded inside the text. “This creates an interesting opportunity for people to discuss books – people who have bought the whole book and people who are reading a sample passage can communicate together in that preview section – word of mouth promotion can take place inside the book itself,” said Travis Alber, BookGlutton’s president.

Readers can connect to Book Glutton via Facebook, and set up reading groups. There are currently over 11,000 reading groups within the site. According to Alber, “Books are social. It’s rare to meet someone who reads and doesn’t care to tell anyone what he’s read. The phenomenon of social reading, whether it means pushing commentary out to social networks or spinning out conversations alongside the content, will grow significantly in the next five years…

“Social reading is tied to this simple idea: people want to share what they’ve read. Technology is the great enabler for this — from Flickr to YouTube, blogs to Facebook, we’ve become a society that values sharing our collected thoughts and observations.”

To learn more about this revolutionary technology, visit the Book Glutton website and their blog, Front Matters. The video below will give you a better look at how it all works.

So now it’s your turn to weigh in: What do you think of this new tech and its ability to improve a reader’s engagement with your work? Weigh in with a comment below, and pass this post along to fellow writers..