Feb07
Last week I toured the middle school that my daughter will be attending next year. One thing that struck me was the school’s decision to issue every student an iPad at the start of the term, as a core teaching device. The operating system was slightly modified to restrict certain applications and features; students can’t download games–the general obsession with Minecraft comes to mind–and after some experimentation this year, they chose to disable messaging as well, due to the (one-could-have-guessed) distractions it causes. The staff at the school cited the weight and heft of textbooks as one factor in their decision to go with eBooks on the iPad. But the advantages I saw went far beyond the tablet as a lightweight alternative to a child lugging a crippling backpack. While observing students in their classrooms, I saw that they were adept not only at note-taking, but in switching applications rapidly and effectively, from reading to research to note-taking. And all of those tasks now embrace interactive multimedia, which makes learning not just more immersive and stimulating, but actually fun. I recall spending hours poring through the World Book Encyclopedia as a child. I don’t miss it; I’d rather use...
Jan04
My posts on the future of eBooks, describing a vision of tomorrow’s eBook platform (the Miranda Proposal), is a futurist’s view based on years of immersion in the evolution of digital media. But in this closing post of the series I want to calm those who worry about a world of “dancing, singing, and shamelessly social eBooks,” while also presenting some very recent data about paper books, eBooks, and eReaders. Read the series: “The Miranda Proposal: Tomorrow’s eBook Platform”: Prologue part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 Epilogue First, despite these essays, I do not believe that there is going to be a single, inevitable path to describe the future of books. The eBook will evolve in many ways, and we will see different, concurrent, unexpected, and not always complementary adaptations. Just as there will always be those who love quietly paper books, so will there be those who embrace the social reading, interactivity, and creative new applications of tomorrow’s eBook platform. The Miranda Proposal describes an overarching eBook platform and a set of features that will transform books into rich, social, digital multimedia. But several have told me that their...
Dec18
There are several companies like Lulu and the Amazon acquisition CreateSpace that are helping writers self-publish their own books. This is similar to the YouTube model, where writers gain popularity through self-promotion and viral word-of-mouth marketing, with their books appearing on Amazon alongside works published through major publishing houses. Read the series: “The Miranda Proposal: Tomorrow’s eBook Platform”: Prologue part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 Epilogue Self-publishing has long been associated with vanity publishing. It’s what you do if you can’t get a professional publisher interested, but you want to see it in print regardless. It’s largely the realm of the amateur: Auntie Irene’s favorite recipes and the calendar made by your local Girl Scout troop. But today’s digital self-publishing world includes a significant, serious, and growing movement: the democratization of publishing. Writers (and artists, musicians, and indy filmmakers) no longer have to rely solely on the rare attentions of traditional publishers; they can gain viral audiences using their own resources and the power of the social web. And it sometimes works on a grand scale; after all, pop star Justin Bieber began his career as...
