“The future book — the digital book — is no longer an immutable brick. It’s ethereal and networked, emerging publicly in fits and starts. An artifact ‘complete’ for only the briefest of moments. Shifting deliberately. Layered with our shared marginalia. And demanding engagement with the promise of community implicit in its form.”
Book lovers fear the end of the texture of paper, the sound of flipping pages, and the excitement of cracking open a new book. “It’s not going to be the same anymore.”
Growing up with technology would have never been the same as picking up a book. Reflecting on my own experiences, it started out with only using school computers for education such as looking on Wikipedia.
Mod explains “take a set of encyclopedias and ask, “How do I make digital? You get a Microsoft Encarta CD. Take the philosophy of encyclopedia-making and ask, “How does digital change our engagement with this?” You get Wikipedia.
Like much of the essay the driving point is that digital becomes powerful when it is not shoehorned into analog conception of artifacts. A book is a book (a newspaper a newspaper) because that was what the technology used to best allow for. With new technology we will redefine our artifacts of information.
“The book of the past reveals its individual experience uniquely. The book of the future reveals our collective experience uniquely.”