Sony’s e-reader announcement next week means e-books have reached the bottom and after five long years the swing upward has begun. And maybe this time around e-books will realize the predictions of five and ten years ago.
Only this time, I think electronic books will be more about motion than words (more so in 2007 and ’08, than in 2006). Static books are not the future of e-books. There’ll be more color, more photos, more graphic novels — manga, that is, already big among our grade-schoolers. There’ll be sound, too. (Well, none of these on the Sony, except manga, I expect.)
You think I’m talking about multimedia, film or animation, but no, I mean books. Children’s books with a sound track. Maybe a dash of interactivity — click a word and the e-reader pronounces it (like the LeapPad — now there’s an electronic book format that didn’t fail). Guidebooks with animated maps. Or guidebooks that let you click on a map and a sightseeing route starting right there will be constructed.
A how-to book — home wiring comes to mind, because I have three of those (who wants to make a mistake dealing with electricity?), but any how-to book really — with one animated diagram instead of six static images struggling to indicate that these two wires should never touch and that one should under no condition be attached here.
Books with multiple-choice questions at the end of the chapter, to reinforce what you just read. Clicking a wrong answer takes you to the paragraph(s) with the relevant information.
Give Yourself Goosebumps books with branching plots, twenty endings and decision points for the reader — do you talk to the stranger or not? They work in print (Tick, Tock, You’re Dead!, et al.), but what if the book chooses for you? The first time you read it, you talk to the stranger, but the next time around maybe there’s no stranger there at all.
Or even better, maybe your e-book library program can provide you with books it knows you’ll like. I went to pandora.com, the music genome project site, and suggested a song, “Take Five”. A “radio station” was created from the observed characteristics of that song, and as I listened to songs being played, I indicated which ones were terrific and which weren’t to my taste, with options to broaden the types of music included. Why not the same for books, maybe starting with a Yes!/No way! checklist for books you’ve already read? Then with that in hand, the suggestions start coming. Maybe publishers would provide first chapters of 50,000 books — the same 50,000 Sony’s online bookstore will sell! — so you could yes-no the titles from the chapters you try and buy the yeses.
And has anyone seen this new toy, 20Q? Price: $15. In twenty questions, 20Q will guess what you’re thinking. Here’s what it got right at our house: washing machine, snowman, firewood, Christmas tree, roast potatoes, teapot, airplane, chessboard. Here’s what it got wrong: football (it guessed baseball — but should we have said a football is soft, not hard?). Surely this kind of data manipulation can be applied to pick the right level chemistry textbook, or identify the three chapters from all the programming books at Safari Bookshelf that deal with the problem you’re having with Perl. Or from the programming books you already own. Or from those available in your public library.
Yes, lots of e-books will just be electronic editions of all-text books — print books you can download. But an electronic book will come to mean a book with features a print book can never have.
And, hey! Maybe that will mean an unexpected boom in sales for publishers, and new work for illustrator/animators, and new positions for editor/authors who create electronifications of old titles. Maybe e-books will be the growth area publishing needs so badly now.
Try 20Q with the more-powerful online version at 20q.net. Turns out the toy came out in 2004, so it’s just new to us. And while the Give Yourself Goosebumps books work as print titles, they’re all out of print now.
Read Neal Stephensons THE DIAMOND AGE — a great story involving an uber-ebook…
Thought at first this was a spam comment. Glad I checked it out — this sounds like a really interesting book, by an interesting author.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Darn, I saw this and thought the same thing, only to discover someone already got here and recommended Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age”. It’s a great book and well worth checking out, and contains a scenario similar to the sort of thing you’re talking about in this post.
Also worth checking out if you’re a cyberpunk fan is one of his other books, “Snow Crash”.
We need to distinguish between the book as physical object vs. book as digital object.
Physical objects need to be constructed and mass produced. Digital objects must first be conceived, but then can be easily reproduced.
One advantage to creating digital objects is cost; you are paying for the device to read it, but not the content itself. Also, producing physical objects requires some degree of capital investment for material and equipment. Creating digital objects requires expertise and time, but no real outlay of cash.
I’ve strolled down the bookstore aisles (esp the kid’s sections) and found some outstanding physical objects that are books. But DIYers like myself would prefer a generic platform (even like the Leapfrog concept) to make content for rather than need to try to convince publishers to manufacture something.
On the subject of guidebooks, there’s a lot of multimedia potential there. I once saw a demo of guided tour via pda/cellphone of Venice. People would carry it while they roamed the city and watch video/audio clips along the way. With Wifi, there were even more possibilities.
Kudos on the Diamond Age recommendation. Gosh, I just ordered it now! It’s really surprising for the book not to come up before on teleread.
really smart post roger, thank you.
ok, now show me an authoring tool.
one that is cheap, and easy to learn,
which produces output that runs on
the hardware now in the infrastructure.
and then you will have something…
-bowerbird
Most of the basic technology exists (built in camera, neural networks, voice recognition, etc). For really fine-tuning the book – student “bond,” both “participants” need to learn from one another. For example, a setup wizard for the device can have an extended portion that gauges the user’s personality (using, for example a multiphasic personailty inventory questionnaire), then adjusts question style (java applet or flash – based or both) and content to better appeal to the individual. With the wealth of knowledge and info available online (with appropriate scrutiny), an EDGE or wifi connection could streamline it further. It would be lovely to see this bit of sci fi become somewhat of a reality…
I use the Nokia 770 and so, over at Internet Tablet Talk, I asked, “How can I get it to …” — well what I asked doesn’t matter, because the answer was mind-opening.
Gene Mosher wrote there:
Despite his comment (and other similar exhortations) I still think of e-readers as islands, as though the device only has the capabilities of what its manufacturer puts there.
That’s true of a device like the Sony, but not of one like the Nokia 770, which is running a full Debian Linux distro and to which any interested developer can port the client-application remote-control software Gene talks about.
I may want local storage for some books, but the big capabilities described here don’t have to be created for a small device — get ’em to run on a desktop and your “network” and you can have them in your carryaround.
So some of the things described in my post rest on the shoulders of the publishers and others on the e-reader device makers and others on the industry as a whole.