After reflecting last month on the future of newspapers some events made me think about the future of books as well.
A couple of weeks ago I finished reading "Engines for Education" by Roger C. Schank and Chip Cleary (click here for a book review). Although it was published in 1995 and it focuses on the American educational system, the book, specially the first chapter, still makes for interesting reading for all those interested in raising education standards (even if as parents).
The final chapter of the book predicts the future of books and guarantees books will change: both in terms of format and the channel / medium in which they are delivered. Interestingly, Schank and Cleary are walking the talk and have created the "Engines for Education" hyperbook which explores hyperlinks to offer readers different discovery paths depending on their interests and needs.
After that, last week I came across two interesting social products - books, what else ("Knowing Knowledge" and "A Million Penguins"). Like these there are many others.
One has to wonder about the role social tools and the Internet as a whole are having and will carry on having on publishing in general. For instance, are these tools allowing faster production of better quality material? Or accounting for the slow-burning creation of indecisive content? Will these joint collaborations try to please everyone and build consensus, or should they focus on expressing views that others can then dispute?
I am very much for joint work and collaboration but, when it comes to non-fiction and non-factual books, I prefer reading about someone's views. By the time a collaborative book which tries to reflect everyone's opinion is finished, you have superficial dissertation on something which is already "old news".
I guess a good reason to use social tools, such as wikis, to write non-fiction, non-factual books, could be to produce a shared view on something which has been observed in practice. However, if one thinks about it, this kind of falls under the banner of factual books...
Bonjour Ana,
On top of internet related elements that have books evolving there is also e-books. They were very trendy at the turn of millennium, went down and seem to re-appear thanks to electronic ink. Innovations now permit to have colour inks and a dramatic reduction in electric consumption. It is now possible to have 15000 hours autonomy with a tiny button battery. Quality of reading is also said to be very proximate to paper books: light is soft. Applications are books, newspaper, school books and advertising walls. Japanese and Korean are currently building factories for their own and targeting China.
As for Collective Intelligence, as chapter moderator of the we>me initiative (MIT CI, Wharton SEI, Pearson and Shared Insight) my understanding is that people underestimate some elements. And Wikipedia is the main source of this underestimation. Wikipedia being an Encyclopaedia can positively mix both user-generated content (one element of web 2.0) and collective intelligence. Encyclopaedias are like Leibniz Monads: a collection of independent articles often written by one and only person. Collective intelligence comes out of the blue by aggregating those user-generated content, hyperlinking them and eventually remixing each one with additional content. That is totally different from a book as books have a specific finality and linear progression. Result is that it's very hard to have people work all together simply we often have different views of the same topic. Writing a book collectively is like building a society: it's political, there is a need for rules than enable the articulation of one with each other. And so far, no much has been done of that side.
Cheers,
Olivier