#google-docs posts — Ben Crowder https://bencrowder.net/blog/tag/google-docs/ Feed for blog posts tagged with #google-docs. Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:22:16 GMT en-US https://bencrowder.net/ Communal reading https://bencrowder.net/blog/2026/communal-reading/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2026/communal-reading/ Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT I’m sure some if not all of these have been thought of before and experimented with, nor do I have any grand conclusions to offer, but in the spirit of essaying and blundering exploration and musing aloud, here are three small ideas about communal reading I’ve been meaning to write about.

First: an async Google Doc book club. Each chapter could be in a separate tab or doc, or all in one long doc. People leave comments, and since the comments are attached to the relevant part of the text, hopefully spoiler risk is somewhat mitigated. Legally, this would only work with texts in the public domain or Creative Commons. If the Google Doc is public or at least open to later requests/invites, you potentially get the interesting effect of the book club discussions happening over longer periods of time (which could be either good or bad, depending on how the others feel about past books getting resurrected).

Second: a Discord audio channel with synchronous meetings where someone reads a chapter (this part is optional) and people talk about it, via audio and/or text. Writing this out, I suppose it’s basically just an audio-only online book club meeting, isn’t it. Still, the audio-only aspect feels more interesting than a group video call. Perhaps the glamour of radio lingers on from my childhood. (Note that I say this as someone who doesn’t really listen to the radio or to podcasts or anything like that, so my opinion here should not be given much weight.)

Third: I came across this bit from Sara Hendren recently.

In August, my friend M and I start a spontaneous micro book club conducted entirely on shared voice notes. We send seven- or eight-minute missives on the ideas we’re reading together: saints and martyrs, postwar humanism. My smart phone, mostly a diabolical source of idling distraction, affords weeks of asynchronous exchange by making audio communication seamless and intuitive. Now I do voice notes with my niece who’s a new mother and with a young friend sharing the ups and downs of her dating life.

Sounds fun. I wonder whether it scales to slightly larger groups. (Not that it needs to, to be clear. Nothing wrong with small.)

If any of you end up trying any of these out or have already done so, let me know how it goes!

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]]> I’ve updated the rest of the scriptures in Word to match the new formatting, and I’ve added the rema... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2017/544/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2017/544/ Sat, 09 Dec 2017 12:00:00 GMT I’ve updated the rest of the scriptures in Word to match the new formatting, and I’ve added the remaining volumes of scripture to Google Docs as well. I’ve also added First Presidency Christmas devotionals to the Collected Talks.

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]]> Scriptures in Google Docs https://bencrowder.net/blog/2017/scriptures-in-google-docs/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2017/scriptures-in-google-docs/ Tue, 31 Oct 2017 12:00:00 GMT I’ve taken the Word edition of the Book of Mormon and have uploaded it to Google Docs, where people can then copy it to their local Google Drive and use it as a study aid (highlighting, comments, etc.):

book-of-mormon-google-docs.png

It also allows for some interesting collaborative scripture study possibilities.

The other volumes of scripture will be coming soon.

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