Tuesday, May 31, 2011

eBook taking shape...sort of...

I was really inspired by Dr. Burton's challenge for us to find a real audience to gear our eBook to, not just the hypothetical one that English students usually write to. I love how Amy has been moving her work towards a real audience by means such as contacting illustrators and posting comments on the English Teachers' Chatboard. I hope that our eBook can add something legitimate to a real audience like hers.

In my mind, Goodreads is a built-in forum that has exactly what we need: lay people (not professors or teachers or book publishers) who are significantly interested in literature, and who are at least technologically literate. However, to my frustration, as I have searched Goodreads for groups that may be interested in our work, the closest thing I can find is other university classes like ours who seem to have created similar projects. Most groups on Goodreads are very informal and they aren't always very active either.

The closest thing I can find is a group that wants to critically discuss world literature, but their emphasis is on books written between 1800 and 1910, a category which only a few of our class's books fall into. I also searched for LDS readerships, but the books most of them seem to be reading are romance novels and fluffy happy contemporary stories...not exactly what we are looking for.

Short of Goodreads, I know that our class also discussed English teachers as a potential readership...but that is so very specific. I think it would be so much more exciting to find people who are just interested in writing and reading, not just in passing a course or teaching one. However, the more research I do, the more convinced I become that such a group does not exist, at least not cohesively. I think that in all practicality, despite how hard we have tried to avoid it, our class may be destined to write to another hypothetical audience--in other words, a nonexistent one.

1 comment:

  1. Have you looked at open educational resources or searched syllabi that mention ebooks? I am betting that a lot of teachers or professors are starting to use and to study ebooks, and they would be a definite audience for something like what we are putting together.

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