http://sprintbeyondthebook.com/future-ofbooks-concept-with-christine-szuter
Christine Szuter - Deep Knowledge Christine Szuter, director of Arizona State University’s Scholarly Publishing program, on books and deep knowledge http://sprintbeyondthebook.com/future-ofbooks-concept-with-barry-eisler
Barry Eisler - Evolving Uses of Books Novelist Barry Eisler on transformations in the ways that books will be used
Welcome to the blurry world of tomorrow’s books – blurry in precisely the same way that some other media forms have become. It’s all about digital technology, of course, which subsumes everything that existed before, and then extends it into new realms. Things bleed into each other: The New York Times posts excellently produced video online, and the BBC publishes textbased articles. The experimentation in book publishing today is great to see. People are using technology to push out the boundaries. At some point, though, what they create no longer seems to fit into any category with historical antecedents.
Chapter 5 How will the concept of the book evolve in the future? as widely as you’d expect. Several zeroed in on a fairly simple but powerful notion: a book starts here, holds your attention for a non-trivial period of time, and ends there. Then again, so does a walk in the woods, or a film. I suspect a book will be anything we decide to call one. Traditional books, after all, span an enormous range of presentation methods, not just topics and styles. Maybe we’re just adding new methods. Words take on new meanings in any case. When was the last time you dialed a phone number by turning a little wheel on a landline telephone with a wire connected to a wall plug? But you knew what I meant by dialing. I do worry that our shrinking attention spans will make traditional reading less and less relevant. But, ever optimistic, I’ll predict that books – whatever that means – do have a future, because we need them.
I’ve asked any number of people in recent months what a book is. The answers have ranged about
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