Literary Mashups
A couple of interesting recent news articles point to the ways in which physical- and e-books; and text and other media, are increasingly converging. Today’s NYTimes has a front page article describing book-video and physical-online hybrids being released by several publishers. And lest week my friend Jeff at Harvard Bookstore was highlighted in Wired for his ability to publish books on demand from the Google Book Search catalog.
So we have physical books with collaborative authoring and online communities, ebooks with embedded sound and video, whole libraries on your phone and in your pocket, ebooks that can be turned physical on-demand, and how-to books that include video demonstrations. Not to mention TextFlows - a whole new way to interact with text (watch for our iPhone app coming soon).
Sure there are still a lot of issues to address but I can’t help but believe that the potential advantages are compelling, and that maybe 2010 will be the year of the ebook…
