The Digital Scholar

Following the success of social networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn, websites that use similar interactive formats to create online reading/publishing communities have begun to appear. By joining one or more of these communities, you can connect with other readers and writers, as well as publish your own writing electronically. Indeed, at no cost to you, you can easily use these websites to publish an entire book electronically and even sell it on the Web.

Below is a short list of some of these reading/publishing community websites. All of them are free to join and they don’t charge anything to publish your work on their site. They also use elements of online community websites to help you market your writing and to connect with other writers and readers.

Through these websites, you become the publisher of your own book by formatting and uploading the content yourself. In most cases, this process is very easy to do. Keep in mind, however, that when writing for the electronic publishing world, the less formatting your original manuscript contains the better. When you upload your writing to some of these sites, the website converts your text into a different format, so any special formatting your writing originally contains may get in the way of this conversion process.

You can make your content available for free on all of the websites listed below. On some of them, you can earn money by opting to charge readers to download and read your writing. There are many good reasons for making your writing available for free, however, foremost among them is that it will help you spread your reputation faster. Readers are much more likely to download your book if you make it available for free than if you charge money for it. All of the sites that give you the option to charge money for your work also allow you to set your own price for it, although the website will keep some percentage of that price.

Through these websites you can dabble in publishing your work without having to find a publisher for your book. All of them let you edit or even un-publish your book at any time, so they can be a great way to test out your ideas and gauge your market before finding a publisher for your book or article.

Even if you are not interested in publishing your work on these websites, you can find interesting works to read and comment on–and maybe even build a community of writers and readers with similar interests as you.

Goodreads – The Goodreads website focuses more on creating a community of readers than on a community of writers. As in Facebook, you create a profile where you can share what you have read with other friends, comment on and rate books, and even track your progress in the book you are currently reading. You can also upload your writing to the website by copying your text into their highly structured template, which organizes it into individual chapters. Writing uploaded by individual users, however, can only be read on the Goodreads website.

Feedbooks – Whereas Goodreads focuses more on sharing the reading of traditionally published books, Feedbooks focuses more on the sharing of writing. The profile you create in Feedbooks strictly centers on content available on its website, which is mainly works that have been uploaded to the website by its users. Unlike in Goodreads, this content can be downloaded in a variety of formats, including Kindle, Sony Reader, and PDF, so that you can take the writing with you.

Scribd – Scribd gives you a choice of uploading your documents to share (i.e., offer them for free) or to sell, and the uploading process is incredibly easy. The site offers all kinds of documents, including books, magazines, brochures, recipes, sheet music, and even resumes and CVs. The website also allows you to create communities, where books can be grouped together on a specific topic. Navigating through the morass of titles on the Scribd website can be difficult, but they tell me that they are working on improving the search and browse functions. Books published on Scribd can be read on the website or can be downloaded in PDF or plain text formats.

Smashwords – Smashwords works a lot like Feedbooks, but it allows you to create a more vibrant author page where readers can learn more about you. You can even add an author video to your page. Just like on Scribd, you can make your writing available for free or for purchase. Books can be read on the Smashwords website or can be downloaded in a plethora of e-book formats.

Do you know of any other reading/publishing communities on the Web? Share them by clicking on the Comments button for this article.

If you want to become a Digital Scholar, where should you start?

There are many easy ways to get the ball rolling in becoming a Digital Scholar, and you may already be doing some of them. Setting up an account with LinkedIn or Facebook to network more easily with friends and colleagues–especially those with whom you have lost touch–is one way. Setting up a Twitter account for similar reasons is another. You can go to Amazon.com and create recommendation lists to help other readers identify the seminal books in your field of expertise, or you can even start contributing articles to Wikipedia.

All of the above activities can help spread your reputation as a scholar. But if you are serious about preparing yourself for the new world of publishing, starting a blog is the best way to go.

One of the reasons why writing a blog is such a powerful tool for participating in the new world of publishing is that once it is up and running, you are perfectly positioned to utilize to the fullest the new publishing technologies for producing, distributing, and drawing attention to your scholarship.

Here are some other reasons why blogs are one of the best publishing tools for the Digital Scholar:

• Blogs are relatively easy to set up and maintain. Even though setting up a blog can be time consuming and a bit tricky at first, it is still much easier and faster to put together than designing your own website. Once you get your blog up and running, adding content to it is a breeze, so you can focus on your writing and scholarship, not website design. (See the Digital Scholar Toolkit for some links and tips to help you get started building your blog.)
• People can easily discover you and your scholarship through your blog. People turn to the web to answer questions and find information about topics that interest them all the time. Your blog can become an authoritative source on the web for providing information about your area of expertise.
• Blogs are a great showcase for you and your work. You can easily direct people to your blog, where they can gain a deeper understanding of what you and your scholarship are all about. You can include the URL for your blog in e-mail signatures, on business cards, and on your Facebook profile. If your URL is catchy enough, you can even verbally encourage friends and colleagues to check out your blog.
• You can build a regular readership with a blog. The regular-article format of a blog gives people who are interested in your area of expertise a reason to return to your site to read your next article.
• You become an instant author/publisher of your own work with a blog. As soon as you hit the “Publish” button, people from around the world can read and comment on your work. A blog is a great place to try out new ideas and see what people think about them before taking those ideas to a traditional publisher. It also lets you build or enhance your reputation in that subject area while you are still testing out those ideas.
• A blog can help you create content for other publishing formats. If you find the task of sitting down to write a book or journal article daunting, the short-article format usually associated with a blog can help you break your subject down into smaller chunks. Keep writing these small articles, and before you know it, you will have plenty of material for that article or book.
• You can use your blog to get a traditional publishing contract. If you write an active blog, you become more attractive to traditional publishers because of the attention you can generate through it.
• You can use your blog to advertise your book or other writing. Whether you publish a book independently, go through a traditional book publisher, or write an article for another venue, you can use your blog to market it. In turn, you can use these other writing opportunities to drive more traffic to your blog.

Blogs can produce big dividends for the Digital Scholar, because they are an idea and content generator, publishing mechanism, and marketing venue all rolled up into one. Blogs require some effort to get started, but once they are up and running, they can pack a powerful punch in the publishing world.