Exact Editions is now providing access to three fascinating books on Social Media from the new Open Access publisher University College of London Press.

The first three titles are available as free PDF files from the UCL Press web site, and they can also be accessed from Exact Editions via these links:

https://institutions.exacteditions.com/how-the-world-changed-social-media

https://institutions.exacteditions.com/social-media-in-an-english-village

https://institutions.exacteditions.com/social-media-in-southeast-turkey

the whole collection from:

https://institutions.exacteditions.com/ucl-press

The books provide empirical, comparative, insights into our use of social media and they have an elegant and readable design:

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Reading and searching the books through Exact Editions’ new web Reader is  straightforward. All this aids readability, and yet much the same functionality can be found with the original PDF files and an adequate PDF app. The distinctive and for books on social media, highly appropriate,  functionality that the Exact Editions platform adds is that the book becomes much more shareable and more efficiently citeable. For example, I can simply and directly share with you via email, message, Twitter or Facebook, individual pages. Here the page which gives us a map of the  city in which the Turkish study was centred:

https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/51052/page/19

That link will take anyone directly to the right page in the book. Having each page individually linkable and shareable is a great advantage for a book that is being studied by a group or used in scholarly references. And for open access books this is a special advantage because, of course, anyone can see the full page. It seems likely that the ability to cite and link directly to individual pages will be very necessary for students of social media. It is really quite inefficient to link to a full PDF file, much better if direct digital links to the precise page are available. And if a discussion is taking place over specific topics in the book, the discussion can proceed with every participant seeing and linking to the same individual pages.

The importance of sharing a specific view or interaction with a digital book is also illustrated by the way that search highlights are delivered when a search query is shared. Again this is a feature which has real potential for teaching and classroom discussions.

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Or see a parallel search for ‘Orkut’ in Social Media in an English Village.

twitter.com/adamhodgkin/status/748546273716932608

The Exact Editions platform uses the open PDF files that the UCL Press makes available for its open access books, and PDF files are a reliable and sensible choice for preserving books with print functionality, but if a book or a set of books is to be widely studied and the reading experience shared, there is much to be said for a platform which allows users and readers to share and cite individual pages.