Books are the last defender of the old business model—the only major medium that still hasn’ t embraced the digital age. Publishers and author advocates have generally refused to put books online for fear the content will be Napsterized. And you can understand their terror, because the publishing industry is in big financial trouble, filled with layoffs and restructurings. Literary scholars are worrying: Can books survive in this Facebooked, ADD, multichannel universe? To what I reply: Sure they can. But only if publishers open them up and provide new ways for people to encounter the written word. We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading. 

Every other form of media that’ s gone digital has been transformed by its audience. Whenever a newspaper story or TV clip or blog post or white paper goes online, readers and viewers begin commenting about it on blogs, cutting their favorite sections, passing them along. The only reason the same thing doesn’ t happen to books is that they’ re locked into ink on paper. Release them, and you release the crowd. BookGlutton, a site that launched last year, has put 1, 660 books online and created tools that let readers form groups to discuss their favorite titles. Meanwhile, Bob Stein, an e-publishing veteran from the CD- ROM days, put the Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook online with an elegant commenting system and hired seven writers to collaboratively read it. 

Neither move should come as a surprise. Books have a centuries-old tradition of annotation and commentary, ranging from the Talmud and scholarly criticism to book clubs and marginalia. Stein believes that if books were set free digitally, it could produce a class of “professional readers” —people so insightful that you’ d pay to download their footnotes. Sound unlikely? It already exists in the real world: Microsoft researcher Cathy Marshall has found that university students carefully study used textbooks before buying them, because they want to acquire the smartest notes. 

The technology is here. Imagine a world where there’ s a URL for every chapter and paragraph in a book—every sentence, even. Readers could point to their favorite sections in a MySpace update or instant message or respond to an argument by plentifully linking to the smartest passages in a recent best seller. This would massively improve what bibliophiles call book discovery. You’ re far more likely to hear about a book if a friend has highlighted a couple brilliant sentences in a Facebook update—and if you hear about it, you’ re far more likely to buy it in print. Yes, in print: The few authors who have experimented with giving away digital copies have found that they end up selling more print copies, because their books are discovered by more people. 

I’ m not suggesting that books need always be social. One of the chief pleasures of a book is mental solitude, that deep, quiet focus on an author’ s thoughts—and your own. That’ s not going away. But books have been held hostage offline for far too long. Taking them digital will unlock their real hidden value: the readers.