The 'Future Book' Is Here, but It's Not What We Expected (2018)

That was a good read.

I wrote 10 books for conventional publishers (Springer-Verlag, McGraw Hill, Morgan Kaufman, J Riley) but burned out on writing. What made writing new and fresh for me was a few years later starting to self publish. I sell far fewer books but I find it much more satisfying writing exactly what I want, not what publishers’ market research dictates.

I stopped publishing physical books, via the excellent Lulu service, because a physical book freezes what I can do with the content. I use leanpub now to publish eBooks and I can effortlessly fix small errors, add examples, and sometimes declare a new edition by adding material and removing out of date material. The platform lets readers get the updates for free. I also started releasing my eBooks with a Creative Commons share with no modifications or commercial reuse license - I encourage readers to share my books with their friends.

The author of this article makes a good case for using an email newsletter. I generally only spend about two hours a day writing and I am not sure if I want to spend some of that time on a newsletter.

Yeah, we have those "future books". They're called webpages.

As for actual books (ebooks or physical), they have their own unique advantages and use cases compared to something with animations, superfluous effects, link jumping, and so on which sounds like a children's pop-up book and less something for focused study.

I find myself frustrated by a different way in which the "Future Book" is slow to arrive - specifically, the glacial pace that e-Ink displays are improving. I bought each generation and found them better and better, and yet... every generation seems further apart and slower and slower to finally close in on the ideal: black ink on a white, non-glowing background.

The. Background. Is. Still. Gray. Dammit!

So frustrating - I'm an enthusiast for these (for travel). I love owning physical books, but would happily cull all but my top books (you know, 60-80 linear meters of shelf space) and keep a lot of things on e-books. But only if e-Ink displays can finally get to a white background!

I'm reaching the conclusion that thinking the future of the book would be a different product is hugely flawed. Books, or reasonably static electronic equivalents -- PDFs and ePubs -- suit the process of immersive long-form content assimilation. Spastic UI/UX does not.

But as with quipu, cuneiform, papyrus, the codex, moveable type, and its manifold enhancements over the past two centuries (the preceding 350 years saw virtually none to the press itself, though book-form itself advanced markedly), the biggest differences have come in the process of creating, publishing, duplicating, archiving, and propagating texts. Not, for the most part, accessing them.

Starting about 1880, a number of changes to text development and distribution began, with typewritten "manuscripts", loose-leaf bindings (enabling updating of already-published texts), databases, digital text storage, digital typesetting (roff and kin, early 1970s), version control systems, online and hypertext systems, wikis, and distributed version control.

(We might push that back slightly further as well to Carl Linnaeus and index cards.)

The ability of many people to collaborate, or compete, in developing a collective narrative, with instantaneous typeset updates is truly novel. It's also to a large degree independent of and agnostic to end-point consumption -- desktop, laptop, mobile, TTS, and hardcopy are all reasonably equivalent from the perspective of the txt.

(Text discovery, recommendation, and popularity are another matter, McLuhan's observations re: medium are relevant.)

We should pay far more attention to process rather than product.

I really like the article, but I have a different point of view when it comes to the ideal "future book".

They seem to carry on the assumption that a book didn't already exist in an ideal format. I'd posit that what we've learned is too many features is actually a bug.

Reading can be a silent, remote activity that coerces you into reflection without the distraction of immediately commenting and joining a community to battle out barely-set thoughts.

A younger me might have said "well a future book according to this person is a web page—capable of almost anything". Now, however, I think a plain transmission in static form (whether read or dictated) is an ideal form unto itself.

Such a static transmission must be worked on, edited, scrutinized. If it isn't, it won't be well-regarded and it can't just go away.

I really like having my collection of paper books. I also really like my Kindle (and I'm so glad there's no community or comment option).

Just to stamp some book-nerd credentials on the end of this—I'm currently working on software in publishing, took a "Book History" course at U of T (Why?), and I'm rarely gifted things, but my sister bought me a first edition of 1984 for a birthday and for some reason my girlfriend decided to buy me an old box set of Azimov's Foundation series (well, the first three) just last week. So there!

A book is (generally) an idea expressed in long written form. It doesn't matter if it's goat skin or e-ink. The medium is pretty much irrelevant. This is why the form hasn't changed in thousands of years and why we don't need interactive features in books.

There are exceptions to this such as recipes books, but these are collections of somewhat unrelated smaller pieces of content which actually work better in other forms such a blog, wiki, etc.

As Summer is arriving, if you haven't chosen a fun science fiction book yet and are interested in the subject of this article, you may enjoy Neal Stephenson's book, "The Diamond Age". A tablet-like "book" plays a central role in the story.

That was refreshingly good.

I’m in the testing phase of an interactive kids’ “future book” series. If you’re into this kind of thing / have kids, would love to hear thoughts.

Pilot episode is live at https://www.featherbubble.com.

IMO we will see the biggest change in how books are written after copyright abolition. We sort of kind of do already, with the big titles like Harry Potter, Star Wars (I know, it started out as a movie) etc. We have the canonical, original books, but we also have a lot of fan-made titles. Some of them create a specific narrative based on the original work, i.e. Harry Potter and the Medhods of Rationality[1], and then people create other fanfiction based on that. 99% of it is fourteen-year-old girls with no writing skills, but there are nuggets that could make great money if not for copyright. I think living, breathing universes made by fans, possibly coupled with chapters released as they're being written, fan voting etc. is the future. Even post copyright, it could make authors money, think crowdfunding or "Character x will either murder y or have sex with y, depending on what option gets more money".

[1] hpmor.com [2] se [1] or https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12461030/1/The-Tinkerer

"email has yet to be usurped by algorithms"

Unfortunately, that isn't true. Many people use apps like GMail for Email, which does filter with algorithms. And many people complain about their emails not getting through.

I find that worrying especially with sight on the social media bans of unwanted people. You'd think they could at least resort to email newsletters, but email is controlled by the same corporations that just banned them.

Everything this article pines for is in modern video games. Story, interaction, jumps out at you (just add VR).