I attended a wedding this past weekend. The crowd was, in the very best sense of the word, bookish. The happy couple met while they were both working at a small independent bookshop in Halifax. As a result, many of the wedding speeches alluded to the power books have in bringing people together, and the real-life social networks that form around the written word.

Today, I reflected on this as I spent some hands-on time with the first public version of Openmargin, a new e-reading platform from a startup based in the Netherlands.

Openmargin is an iPad-based e-book app. That in itself isn't particularly novel. There are a lot of different apps that let you read e-books. But here's what's different: while reading something in Openmargin, you can highlight any passage and leave a note. Your note immediately becomes public, and anyone who's reading the same book can see it at any time. You can also see other people's notes about the book you're reading.

It's a bit like borrowing a book from the library, or buying one from a used bookshop, and discovering someone else's hand-scrawled notes in the margins.

This past summer, while Openmargin was in closed beta, I spoke with Joep Kuijper, one of the company's co-founders. As he explained, "People always use the margin to make notes around text. We say that it would be interesting to make this margin open, so it becomes a public space for all the readers of the same book."

Openmargin is a bit like borrowing a book from the library, or buying one from a used bookshop, and discovering someone else's hand-scrawled notes in the margins.

Kuijper and his colleagues see Openmargin as a new way to think about books. "At the moment, I think digital books are still like their paper brother, but digital. We think it can be a more social platform, the book itself. People want to meet within the book itself. People want to be part of a community."

Openmargin isn't alone in this. Earlier this year, Canadian e-book company Kobo announced its own social reading features, which have been rolled into the company's new Vox e-reader. And for a while now, Amazon's Kindle platform has had annotation features, where users can add public or private notes to their books.

David Weinberger, the co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, says these new digital tools support a longstanding impulse to read socially.

"We've had an urge to read socially from the very beginning," he says. Think of young children sitting on their parent's lap, reading together. "That's an intensely social environment."

As Weinberger points out, "Historically, reading started out as a group activity. Few people could read, or afford the books and so you would get up to the lectern and you would read out loud. The notion that reading is inherently a private activity is not a natural property of reading. It's just an inherent limitation of books."

So, what does this mean for writers?

"For authors, this means they can publish content, but it's not finished at the date of publishing. Because then, in the margin, readers can add to it,” says Joep Kuijper from Openmargin. “There can be an ongoing dialogue, where the author can be the host. We think this is going to be really interesting for independent authors. It becomes really important to build a community, and to interact with your community. So we give the possibility to independent authors to directly interact with their community and directly sell content to them."

I understand the impulse here. I like the idea of reconceptualizing what a book is, and I like the idea of turning digital books into platforms for discussion. But personally, I'm not so hot on the idea of authors publishing books that, well, aren't completed yet. Maybe that's just my old-school sensibility. You know, wanting a book to be finished before I read it.

Openmargin plans to sell its services to both independent authors and large publishers. In addition to their iPad app, they've developed an API that third parties can use to build on top of their technology.

"We have an iPad application, but we also have a web platform," says Kuijper. “And all your notes go onto this web platform. So you can send them to Twitter, you can send them to Facebook, but you can also interact, hopefully in the future, with readers from other platforms. So, for example, if I have an iPad, I can have a dialogue with someone who has a Samsung Tab. That should be possible."

I have to wonder. In 10 years, will I be invited to a wedding where the couple met one another through each other's digital marginalia on an e-book reader? That seems doubtful. I'm not so sure about the success of individual products or services like Openmargin's. As for the larger trend – using technology to create a social layer on top of reading – expect to see much more of that in the near future.