Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind (2)
by David Streitfeld
With the new era so slow to arrive, some experts in the future of the book seem to be getting a little weary of the topic. Bob Stein, a pioneering digital innovator, wrote recently that “people often ask me to expound on the ‘future of the book.’ ”
Since Mr. Stein is founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book, one might think he would expect and even welcome this. He does not. “Frankly,” he wrote, “I can’t stand the question.” There is even a movement of sorts proclaiming that the most innovative delivery mechanisms for stories is happening not online, but in physical books. Its manifesto is printed on the cover of a new volume, “Fully Booked: Ink on Paper: Design & Concepts for New Publications,” mocking the notion of the Internet as the latest thing. “The Internet is not dead,” the cover proclaims. “Digital will not disappear. Print will not kill the web. It’s easy to forget that when physical books were invented, news websites ignored them, and then laughed at them as a niche pursuit for geeks.”
Books have come full circle. For much of the 20th century, they were regarded as one of the triumphs of design: simple to use, cheap to produce, nearly indestructible, highly portable, energy-efficient. They were the best means of transmitting knowledge the human race had ever known.
Then came the Internet. Books suddenly seemed in need of an overhaul. “The physical book had become a pretty limited thing, dead to design outside of its cover,” said Peter Brantley, who runs Books in Browsers, a technology conference in San Francisco. “Then all the constraints were gone.”
The notion that books require too much time to read dates back, at least, to midcentury entrepreneurial operations like Reader’s Digest and CliffsNotes, which offered up predigested texts. So some start-ups chose a basic approach: Take a text and break it up.
Safari Flow, a service from Safari Books, offers chapters of technical manuals for a $29 monthly subscription fee. Inkling does the same with more consumer-oriented titles like cookbooks. If you want only the chapter on pasta, you can buy it for $4.99 instead of having to buy the whole book.
Citia is a New York start-up with a much more ambitious approach. Working in collaboration with an author, Citia editors take a nonfiction book and reorganize its ideas onto digital cards that can be read on different devices and sent through social networks.
“The ability to commit 10 or 15 hours to a book is going to be an increasingly fraught decision,” said Mr. Meyers, who came across Citia in the course of his research and found it so intriguing that he became its vice president for editorial and content innovation. “So we need ways to liberate the ideas trapped inside them.” One of the first books given the Citia treatment was Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants. Material directly from the book is in quotation marks and the author is referred to in the third person, which lends a somewhat academic distance to the summaries. Sections of the book are summarized on one card, then the reader can drill down into subsections on cards hidden underneath.
[to be continued, click here]
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