Last week, my final thoughts were about community. If you'd asked me a year ago, I would have said, "Absolutely, reading is a solitary activity. Just me and my book. And maybe a glass of wine." Today, as I'm thinking about reading, I'm realizing that it's not the "me" activity one would imagine.

When I was in the third grade, my teacher would read us a chapter from a book every day. My favorite was Island of the Blue Dolphins. The entire story played out miles from my home—I could see the island from the highway. My mom, the librarian, read to the family during dinner. My favorites from her were the King Arthur stories. Man, I have a weak spot for knights in shining armor.

For a few years, my husband and I had this thing where we'd play the audio version of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash while on road trips (we don't take many and it's a long book). We'd both read this one separately, of course—how can you be an early Internet geek without a little Stephenson on your reading resume?—but it was just as much fun to hear it together. We'd listen, we'd pause, we'd discuss, we'd remember.

Back when it was first released, we were also playing online with friends in San Francisco. Nobody did anything but play in those days. This was when a graphic, web-browsery thing called NetCruiser was all the rage. Back when it was the height of cool to play chess via email. Back when you could see what was new on the Internet—the entire Internet—and still have time to experiment with the early version of chat.

And we talked about books with those friends. Talked about Snow Crash. Wow, we thought, imagine a virtual world. If you've been to Second Life, you're thinking, "Maybe next virtual world." But no matter, it's a book that came to life. Imagine that...someone imagined a reality, and then someone made that imagination real.

Fast forward to 2008. I've been a member of my book club for about ten years. I'm one of the newer members, though not the newest. I joined after they'd done the Jane Austens and some Russians (saving, however, The Brothers Karamazov for me). That was when we had the "old" list. We've integrated a new list because there were titles on the old list that nobody wanted to read, though a few die-hards insist we have to give it a shot. So once a month, we get together to talk about one book, though we talk about a lot more (there's a reason it's also known as "wine club").

Think about it. You read, however you read. I know people who, for various reasons, are audiobook-only readers. I know people who are blind readers. I know people who read slowly, excrutiatingly slow for someone like me. I know people who rival me in speed (I can't help it, even when I want to linger...). The one thing we all have in common is that reading is just part of the experience.

The best often comes when we talk about the story, the words, the vision, the ideas. Every person comes away from the book with something different. No two people have the same experience when they read a book. It's all about putting impressions together. Books, and I'm talking fiction in particular, are about community. We read, but that's only a piece of the experience. Our relationship with a book doesn't end when we read the final sentence. For some of us, our relationship with certain books never ends at all. And we want to share our thoughts about that book with everyone we meet.

A lot of people worry about the future of the novel. I don't. I do worry about the business of publishing because the industry depends on ad hoc groups to build community and sustain community and maintain the passion necessary to keep the world excited about book—and I'm going to tell you, the kind of community that this industry needs requires more resources (yeah, that's code for money) than the current business model permits.

We live in this crazy new world that throws old rules over for new rules without a passing thought. Old rules in the book biz were top down, you told me what I wanted to read. Now I'm telling you what I want to read—I want dialogue with authors, booksellers (really, I wish  more booksellers were working together to, I don't know, create consortiums of passion for books), publishers, everybody.

Community only works if everyone contributes. For this first decade and a half of what is our online revolution, readers, especially, have brought the passion and the innovation while the publishers have remained on the sidelines. But if I'm building my half of the bridge and you're waiting for marketing to devise a project plan, then I have other worlds to explore. If we don't want to talk about the publishing industry in the past tense, then the publishing industry needs to change how it relates to books and readers.

I am not 100% sure of how one goes about building a perfect reading community online (and offline, because it ain't about one medium), but I do know that leaving it up to the readers and authors isn't enough. We need serious industry investment into building serious community. Serious communities require sustained involvement, or if not sustained, then a loom big enough to handle the warps and wefts of individual involvement.

There are communities out there—Shelfari, LibraryThing, Goodreads, among others—and it's a joy to see how these groups are growing and changing. How word spreads from one reader to the next about tools and resources and fun. Like so much of what is happening online when it comes to books, these communities thrive despite the publishing industry. Imagine the possibilities if the industry side of the business threw as much passion into these communities as readers do.

When it comes to building a community of book people, so much of the burden is placed on those who read books (also known as consumers). Maybe once the professionals were able to remain up on the hill, above the community, living off the labor of those on the street. If that time ever existed, it's over now. If the publishing industry doesn't invest in the reading community in a serious, meaningful, sincere manner now, then maybe, like newspapers, the publishing industry as we know it will cease to exist.

Like I said, I'm not worried about the future of the novel. Story will survive. It will thrive. But the industry, the thing we know as publishing? It has to join the community or be cast off into the wilderness.

Or maybe I should just say this: I like to talk about books. Don't you, too?

Posted by: Kassia Krozser