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The Future of the Book
Wednesday, June 20, 2007 — posted by Sarah
This was clearly the highlight of the conference.Manolis Kelaidis, freelance designer, on bLink: Completing the Connection Between the Analog and Digital Worlds
bLink ("blink") stands for "book link."
He believes that books can be art objects, rather than solely a device to convey ideas. Old books have value (sometimes more than new ones). Old ebooks? Probably not.
Book is best interface available for information. Information retrieval from book is much easier than from digital interface. We tend to remember where information was located spatially -- at the beginning of the on a left-hand page. This context is lost in digital media.
Digital media does offer "seductive possibilities," such as linking from one place to another. He used threads to connect different pages and also bookmarks, but that didn't work so well. How do you connect one book to another book?
So, the challenge becomes to put together the best parts of analog and digital books. A printed book with buttons that let you access digital information.
Woo! Spontaneous applause as he touches a spot in the book AND LAUNCHES HIS WEB BROWSER to google that topic.
Hyperlink from the end of an essay to a discussion board about that essay.
Other ideas: Touch a paragraph, and the nearby books in the library change color to indicate that they are relevant to your topic. (Books would be tagged.)
Link to music, and include a volume bar on the book page.
Integrate the music into a novel. As you read the page, the relevant music plays.
He shows live examples of all of this. The audience is amazed.
Possibilities include:
- citations
- discussion
- play
- questions
- email searching
- hearing
Another option is the "autonomous book," which contains all of the data instead of linking back to another device.
Advertising integration...read a depressing book like Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead and suddenly find a cheery ad for a trip to the Bahamas! OK, not a good idea and artistically offensive because it destroys the immersive experience of the novel. But what about a do-it-yourself magazine with relevant ads in a corner?
The key to all of this is printing with conductive ink, which has been available in electronics for decades. The innovation is printing on paper, and being driven by the printed electronics industry. Other applications include flexible displays, RFID, memory, speakers, and paper batteries.
That was way cool.
There will eventually be video of the presentation posted. Look for it, again, on the conference web site.
Labels: toc2007
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