Theodore Gray, Wolfram Research, Touch Press
Published first book in print and electronic form in 1992 and nobody cared about the CD Rom. World didn’t carte about it then. Technology wasn’t there yet. If The Elements had come on floppy disks would have taken 4,250 disks. Got idea from Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks. Actually built a periodic table as a real table. Put together a website about the Table. Put a large amount of effort into the site and made no money out of it. Then published a print book which was more rewarding than website – sold over 300,000 copies. Unsatisfying to earn money in paper in what he thought was still an website. Then Apple produced a device and a marketplace. An amazing thing to have created from a sociological point of view. As soon as saw it realized that this was the medium for the Table. Knew what he wanted to do but no tools were available to create it, so had created the tools. Apple put it on the preview iPad that were sent to journalists. Used Mathematica to create an interactive page layout tool. Completely automated the production of the final files. Everything in the app was generated by Mathematica and using custom code created in Mathematica. Eventually invented a company, Touch Press, to do this type of thing again. Mandate of Touch Press is to find out what books can be in the future. Need three things: a real author who can tell a real story, software and multimedia companies don’t understand this; then need real programmers, video game companies understand this and print publishers don’t; need television producer’s eye for imagery and ability to create this on time and in budget. Second title is The Solar System. Had 60 days to do The Elements in order to get it onto the iPads released to reviewers. Basically operating like a television or movie production company. Coming out with The Waste Land, by TS Elliot, in conjunction with Faber and Faber. Don’t thing there is a future in paying for ordinary textbooks. Pricing model of iPad and current textbooks will move the books to the iPad and simple textbooks will be produced as open source projects. People will pay for really interesting stuff and interactivity. Incorporating the Wolfram Alpha engine into their stuff, and it is in The Elements already. Also pushing the Computer Document Format which will make enhanced textbooks easier and richer.
