Nope, I wouldn't buy it

The comments section on author blogs and on Amazon.com already permit readers to air their views, question an author’s premise or add their own knowledge to the content of a book.

Now, in an experiment developed by SharedBook, a company that designs customized books and allows readers to annotate documents online, the publisher of “Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children,” a book about parenting by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman that went on sale last week, is inviting readers to make notes on three chapters of the book.

Starting Sept. 14, chapters concerning praise for children (and why too much is not a good idea), the importance of an extra hour of sleep and the prevalence of lying among children, will be posted on PoBronson.com, Nurtureshock.com and Twelvebooks.com, the Web site of the book’s publisher, the imprint that released the book. Readers will be able to highlight a word, a sentence or a paragraph and add notes that will be integrated as footnotes on the text.

“We thought this would be a great way to go deep into the text and literally argue with it sentence by sentence, collectively,” said Jonathan Karp, publisher and editor in chief of Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group.

SharedBook will collect footnotes and incorporate them with the three chapters into a PDF that readers can buy for $2.95.

--"A Book that Lets Readers Handle the Footnotes," New York Times