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NeoBook

Thinking about books and there often predicted demise and spawned off comment from a recent post 'The death of the book,' I did a quick search for 'future of the book' type sites. I found The Institute for the Future of the Book, and an article The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World, by Clifford Lynch. Both look pertinent and I have to dig into these resources.

But before I do, (and I'm sure it's discussed there) what are specs for the NeoBook.

Consider what books are now and what to keep:

• Portable
• no-power (but light?)
• Table of contents
• index
• The flip-to-a-page action, e.g. you know what you're looking for and it's near the middle of the book....
• Bookmarks, dog ears
• The medium is the message - the cookbook opens to the most commonly visited recipe

Consider what books don't have now, but could

• Full text search
• Hyperlinks to full text of information sources.
• Animation
• Sound
• Infinitely expandable margins
• Self-lighted
• skinnable
• like a wiki but versions are transparently overlayed - can revert to original
• font, graphics, links, annotations, text
• can rank and vote on versions
• the edits can be selectde off a list, e.g. King James Version
• differences can be calculated between versions

Problems

Say you're working on a report. You'd like to have all your reference texts open and available in a large pile surrounding you. Hmm, but say you have all your books on one handheld device. So maybe poly-book functionality. Switching between books easily on your device. But screen real estate would be at a premium. I keep thinking 'virtual reality.'

What trouble Fermat would have saved the world if his margins were infinitely expandable. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat’s_last_theorem|Fermat's Last Theorem].

Things to fold in

Until we have a hyperlinked and hyperlinkable book with infinitely expandable margins that you can read in multidimensions, how useful is exhaustive annotation?

More neobookish thoughts: suppose authors publish their books in a wiki-like format. Then, ala Rainbows End, readers can decide for themselves how they wish to read the book. The orignal book, the book minus errata, the book with hyperlinks to references, the book re-written cooperatively by fans, or critics. These alternative views could be layers upon layers of extra-creative work. This sounds like a living book, at least a neobook. The best or most popular views would rise to the top of the noise through Slashdot/Digg type mechanisms. All views would be available at all times so that if you were confused or uncomfortable with a certain passage you could see how and where that thread of edits began. Of course, rewriting the ending is a common enough gag, but how about rewriting the whole book?

With Rainbows End, I've been amazed how many other books I've read fall into the plot. It's kind of the culmination of readings to date. But looking backwards, Vinge doesn't suggest which books to read if you're interested in topic X or Y. My 'view' of the book would provide that overlay of additional information.

I guess that's part of what this web log is for: links from the book, both explicit and implicit, are given, and connections with other books and sites are noted.

One book suggests a hundred more to read. I can envision the books I've read as a web or network with each node a book or website. Each node may or may not be connected to many many others. Morville's Ambient Findability for example is almost pure bibliography.

Wouldn't it be cool to be able to follow these links of connected books and websites - documents, anyway; to pivot, in a faceted classification system sense, on author, on title, content, subject; in a wiki-sense a list of backlinks to see where else this book was mentioned? A Science Citation Index, if you will. Trackbacks, etc....