Via GalleyCat comes news (to me) that there are some people (apart from Jason Epstein, whom I mentioned here and here) who aren’t just thinking about the future of books or saying they’re making plans; they’re actually doing something about it.
[The Instititute for the Future of the Book] is working toward a vision of what books can be. This summer, it will release the first version of Sophie, an “all-purpose tool” for creating multimedia texts. Like the institute itself, Sophie’s mission is both simple and complex: to help authors easily create books that use any medium …. It’s a key goal, because the future of the book lies in the hands of authors first. Give them the tools they need to deliver dynamic, digital books, and dynamic digital books will flourish.
Echoing what Jeff Jarvis has been saying at BuzzMachine, GalleyCat’s Ron Hogan highlights the fact that “moving online will transform the relationship that books have to their readers and to each other.”
In an interview, Institute fellow Ben Vershnow goes even further. He says that intellectual discourse itself “is moving away from print to networked, digital media.”
Here’s part of an interview with Vershbow:
What about those who provide and use information today? Surely there are legal, cultural, and business interests in keeping information flowing?
Our notion of intellectual property also defines the parameters of how we interact with information and culture. Today’s media industries want to preserve old business models built on scarcity in a network of abundance. Clearly, notions of value need to be recalibrated, but these industries are determined to stick with what they know. So, we find ourselves tangled in a web of restrictions, closely monitored in our use of media online. … [This issue, among others, comes] down, in one way or another, to ownership. Who owns the Internet? We the people who create it and make it meaningful or the companies that maintain the plumbing? Who owns works of authorship? Do we own them once we’ve paid a fair price for them, or are we always tourists in someone’s closely surveilled online reserve? And perhaps most troubling, who owns our network identities?
What future for the print book? Is it even conceivable that future generations will eschew the benefit of multimedia?
It’s really impossible to predict exactly what will happen to print books. Of one thing, though, I am pretty certain: the main arena of intellectual discourse is moving away from print to networked, digital media. That doesn’t mean that certain forms of print books will not persist. In fact, the mass migration to computers and the Internet in some ways serves as a foil for print, dispensing with its more circumstantial uses and highlighting its most essential virtues. There are certain kinds of books I’m convinced will cease to exist on paper: directories, reference works, textbooks, travel guides, to name a few. But deep, linear narrative works read for pleasure like novels, biographies, and certain forms of history may persist in print for some time. [emphasis mine***]Then again, this could simply be a generational question. People raised with high-quality electronic reading devices, using only multimedia electronic texts in school and forming little or no attachment to dead-tree media, may consider paper books at best fascinating antiquities, at worst, inert, useless things.
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***I also think narrative works may persist in print. And I also believe they should remain whole. Here’s what I had to say on the subject over at BuzzMachine:
May 27th, 2006 at 6:28 pm There are many thriving online communities and sites devoted to spreading the word about little-known works of fiction, non-fiction, works by foreign authors (not translated into English), etc. There’s a huge conversation about books taking place online. The lit world has yet to acknowledge it.The same lit world has yet to acknowledge that Bush is president, that computers make your life and your job easier, and that the world isn’t flat, however. Plus, they’re not the ones who are holding back the revolution. It all revolves around licensing issues: who’s gonna get paid for the content, how much, and how. And digitizing your back catalogue is a huge investment. Google has the money. Publishers don’t.Yes: hands-off fiction. But I think you’ll find that you want to keep hands off many non-fiction books as well: everything from the big biographies to nonfiction narratives to memoirs to popular histories, etc. Also, authors will want to keep their works whole. Don’t underestimate that, or their reasons. Some of it really is art, and not meant for mashing-up. And it is their work, and the decision should be theirs.Which doesn’t mean all of it shouldn’t be available digitally, in various formats, and that there shouldn’t also be value-added stuff (maybe like the supplementary materials PBS offers on its Frontline website) and that people shouldn’t start to apply themselves and start thinking about and creating the book world they want to inhabit in the future.
Apparently, Carly Fiorina had many choice words for publishers, telling them that they will not be able to hold back the tide and should stop trying. She also said some really stupid things about the editorial process, though, so she may have shot herself in the foot.