Comments on: How to create new reading experiences profitably

By: Herb Abrams

Herb Abrams — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:16:43 +0000

I’m really happy to come upon this presentation because it echoes my thinking on where books and reading may (will?) go in the future.
Just as the move from a text editor to a heavily featured word processor like MS-Word, or the move from a simple raster paint program to a 3D vector tool like AutoCAD represent great leaps forward in capability and user experience, they also encounter the burdens of complexity, longer learning curves, bloated feature sets and user resistance.
A book is, usually, a story. This obvious for a novel, but for non-fiction, it is still true. A calculus text has a progression of ideas. The thread of a discussion is not just a history of posts but also should have a sequential logical progression that is of value to the reader. Okay maybe the yellow pages has no story but how about the Zagat guides?
I see the challenge here to be: How to exploit the great capabilities of modern IT to serve the needs of humans to find meaning in the story that can now be told in a much richer way while avoiding the same burdens of complexity mentioned earlier. Emulating pages and bookmarks on a screen is trivial. Harness the power of search, indexing, random access, metadata, timestamped updates and collaborative content creation please. Do it without a toolbar that has fifty icons. Put me in control of the voyage and let me take the route I want.
This will take a while. I’m working on one solution for one segment of the market.
Until real progress in transforming books and reading starts to take shape, the marketplace will be cluttered with gadgets that are not of much value.
It turns out that cranking out new hardware is much easier than developing breakthrough software.

By: La Feuille » Archive du blog » Passer d’un modèle centré sur la distribution à un modèle centré sur le lecteur ?

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:24:54 +0000

[...] création de nouvelles expériences de lectures », explique l’éditeur et auteur Mitch Ratcliff, dans un billet plutôt intéressant – même s’il n’est pas sans certaines [...]

By: Mitch Ratcliffe

Mitch Ratcliffe — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:15:21 +0000

Absolutely — ISTC in particular is the best mechanism for a combined ISBN/part identification of a work. It was part of my presentation in New York, but I wanted to avoid the details for this article, so that the bigger ideas could stand on their own. There are a variety of standards and protocols that could be combined to produce a workable system.

By: Kevin Hawkins

Kevin Hawkins — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:39:51 +0000

You say a system of “universal pagination” (canonical references to particular spans of text) will lead “yield one ISBN per book that, coupled with various nascent text indexing standards, could produce an index of a title across media”. I think you mean that such universal pagination would rely on a work identifier like an ISTC, xISBN, or thingISBN, rather than an edition identifier like a true ISBN. In any case, assuming each edition uses the canonical numbering scheme, we could indeed generate concordances more easily than in the past.

By: Dave Barnes

Dave Barnes — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:15:14 +0000

Publishers are too stuck in their current business models to create Infinite Books.
There are no “smart” publishers; only soon to be out of business publishers.

By: Daily Digest for 2010-01-05 | RatcliffeBlog

Daily Digest for 2010-01-05 | RatcliffeBlog — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:01:02 +0000

[...] Feed. How to create new reading experiences profitably — the final installment in a series. http://booksahead.com/?p=971 #publishing [...]