What the future book will look like

In the past, the book was defined as any printed matter with cover and back covers. A book can also be a phone book, although it has no logical connection to the beginning, middle, and end. A stack of white paper with the cover, and then bound up with the coil, called "Sketch book", it does not have rich content is called book, because as long as it has a covers and back, it can be called "book."

At present, paper pages are slowly disappearing, leaving behind only the conceptual structure of the book-the text that is organized according to a subject, an experience that takes time to complete.

The shell of the traditional book is disappearing, so we also have reason to doubt that the form of the books has also become a fossil of the old? The traditional way to make a book invisible shell, compared with the various forms of writing today, what is the advantage?

On the internet, we can spend hours reading good novels, reports, and thinking, and not meeting any book-related things. Bits of information, all sorts of clues and skim-through, this is the attraction of the Web: it loosely organizes assorted information.

There are books on the web, too. For the first time in 1994, I published a complete paper book online, one of the earliest e-books. However, on the Internet, access to these books without any threshold, so the contents of these books gradually disintegrated, become an impossible to distinguish some of the prophetic fragments. Without restraint, the reader's attention is easily dispersed, leaving the core story or argument and wandering elsewhere. The rapid transfer of attention points constitutes a centrifugal force that drives readers away from books.

Using a specialized reading device seems to help solve the problem. We can now use a tablet, a pad, or a handheld reader. One of the most surprising is the handheld reader. Experts have asserted that no one would want to read a shiny screen that was only a few inches large, but they were wrong. Now many people are willing to use the smartphone to read books, in fact, we do not know, the reader screen can do how small. There is an experimental way of reading, called "rapid sequence Visual rendering", which uses a screen with only one word width. While reading, your eyes remain still and stare at the position of a word, but that Word will be replaced by the next word in the book. In this way, your eyes see a sequence of "back and forth" words, rather than a word that is shot around one another, so the screen doesn't need to be too big.

Other new reading screens are dedicated to creating a reading experience like a book. Right now, the anti-photoelectron ink screen is subverting the old publishing industry. This technique is like covering a layer of dark text that can be transformed on a white paper that reflects the ambient light. For ordinary people's eyes, in this particular "paper" (actually a layer of plastic), the text is as clear and readable as the traditional black and white. The first generation of black and white ink technology has made the Kindle a big seller, far ahead of other similar products.

In the case of electronic ink, "book" is a flat-panel reader, a thick board, which presents a page of content. Click on this thick plate can be "page", the previous page content hidden, change the content of the next page. The biggest feature of e-books that use electronic paper is that the size of the font can be mediated by personal preferences. Want to make a little bit bigger? Just tune it and the text of the whole book will adjust to what you want.

The electronic ink screen can be a book size, and can be larger, the Kindle has provided two specifications. With the increase in usage, we may see that the ebook has the recommended language: "This book is best read with a tablet reader of number 3rd." "And you may have several number 3rd readers, the favorite one may be used for a long time with a soft leather sleeve, the most fit your hand type." For art magazines, a large reader may be recommended for use on a coffee table.

However, e-books do not necessarily have to be presented in a flat-screen reader. Eventually, electronic ink paper will be able to be made in a cheap way, in thin slices. We can bind 100 pages of such a piece of paper, let it have a spine, and then wrap the beautiful cover. In this way, e-books are like old-fashioned books. We can literally turn the page, navigate in 3D, and look for what has been read before by guessing where it is in a pile of pages. To change a book, you just need to click on the spine. Then the same page shows the contents of another book. A 3D book, this is too attractive, it is worth buying a good, it should be as smooth as satin, the pages to the thinnest!

Personally, I like a bigger one. I want e-book readers to unfold like origami, at least as big as today's newspapers, or as many pages. I don't mind spending a few more minutes looking back at the original size and putting it in the pocket. I enjoy browsing through multiple columns on the same page and jumping between several headings. MIT's Media Lab is experimenting with a prototype of a book that uses a portable laser to project the contents of a book on a nearby plane, anything at hand as a screen or page.

At the same time, we look at the screen can also look at us. The "Little Eyes" on a tablet reader--the camera can see your face, now, the prototype facial tracking software has been able to identify people's emotions, determine if you're watching the screen, and more importantly, be able to determine where you're looking at the screen. It can read you are confused about a piece of content, or pleasure, or boring. This means that a piece of content can vary according to what the reader feels about it, can be expanded in more detail, or shortened and simplified in fast reading, and if you're struggling to read it, it can change the word, but it can make hundreds of changes. At present, there are many experiments on this adaptive text. One of them is to give different descriptions and stories based on your reading schedule.

Such flexibility awakens a long-standing but never-ever-ending dream: multiple finale novels. There are several different endings, or different story lines of the book. In the past, people's attempts at "hyper-literature" (hyper literature) have not been accepted by readers and ended in frustrating failure. Readers seem to have no interest in deciding the plot, and they still want the author to decide. In recent years, however, the games have been successful in providing a variety of development paths. (By the way, in some games, players need a lot of reading.) The cutting-edge technology used to simplify user-driven gaming can also be kept in books.

Especially the books with dynamic images. There is not a word to represent such a book now. With a lot of static pictures of the book, we call the picture book, tea table books, or pictures. But in the electronic book, the picture has no reason to be still, and we have no reason to think that the book with the dynamic image is the movie. On one screen, we can combine text and dynamic images to complement each other. The image is in the text and the text is in the image. Both the New York Times and The Washington Post have produced interactive graphs that are close to the combination of dynamic images and text.

To achieve this mix of movies and books, we also need to create a series of tools that are not currently available. At present, it is still difficult for people to browse dynamic images, break down a movie, or make textual comments for a frame in a movie. The ideal situation we want to achieve is to control the dynamic images as easily and easily as possible to control the text now-to make indexes, add reference information, cut, paste, make summaries, references, links, and explain the content. With such tools (and techniques) we can create a whole set of visually-rich books that are especially suitable for training and education, which we can learn from and return to for learning. It can be a book to watch, or a TV show to read.

When the table is not only a table, but also used to display electronic books, and books are not only books, but also like television viewing, we need to go back to the original question: What is the book? Once you've switched to numbers to make it, what will it become?

The direct result of making books using digital means is that the book can be displayed on any screen at any time. Books can be "on call", and people will no longer need to buy or hoard some books before they can read them. The book will no longer be an entity, but a stream of data that can be present at any moment.

Current E-book managers, Amazon, Google and publishers have reached an agreement to reduce the fluidity of e-books by banning readers from cutting and pasting text content, copying content, or making significant alterations to content. But in the end, E-books will be liberated and the nature of the book will shine. By then, we will find that books, never wishing they were just phone books, catalogues, or any kind of huge, lengthy list. This kind of function is the website's forte, may update, may search, but the book is not good at. What the book wants is to be annotated, tagged, sketched, angled, summed up, quoted, added hyperlinks, shared, and communicated with people. and become e-books, all this will be achieved, there will be more surprises.

This new freedom of electronic giving to books can be seen through the Kindle. While reading, one can mark (albeit somewhat difficult) fragments that you want to remember, and you can also export fragments of these tags to read the selected or important or exciting content over and over again. More importantly, if I wanted to, I could share what I had flagged with others, and read what others had to share. We can even sift through the best clips that are tagged by the most readers, to read in a whole new way, or to read the content of a friend, scholar, or critic. In this way, more readers will be able to see the precious annotations of another author when they read a book carefully (they need to be allowed to do so). In the past, it was a feast that only a handful of book collectors could enjoy.

Reading becomes more social. Not only can we share what we are reading, but also share our thoughts and notes when we read. Today we are able to mark a paragraph and tomorrow we will be able to link different paragraphs together. We can link one of the phrases we read in a book to the antonyms that appear in another book that we read before, you can link one of the words in the book to the contents of the dictionary and link a scene in the book to a scene similar to the one in the movie. (These all require tools to find relevant paragraphs.) We can subscribe to the annotations of one of our esteemed readers and see what they are reading, along with the notes they give to the book, including excerpts, notes, questions, and thoughts.

Today in the Goodreads and other media on the wise reading Club discussion activities, one day will be through hyperlinks in the way of the book itself tightly combined, deeper embedded in a book. When someone quotes a paragraph in the book, a two-way link is generated, linking his comments to the paragraph. Even a small piece of content, such as Wikipedia, can accumulate a long list of comments that will be closely linked to the paragraph being reviewed.

High-density hyperlinks will make every book a web, and now a book is most often linked to the title of another book. In an electronic book, if a book is mentioned in the content or reference, it can be linked to the whole book. In addition, the link may be specific to a paragraph in another work, but this is not technically possible. Wait until one day, we can let the links into the file inside, accurate to the sentence, and make two-way links, we will be useful network books. This is what Tede Nielsen (Ted Nelson) originally conceived of as Docuverse. (He also designed a micro-payment and credit system to form a complete text economy.) )

If you want to know what this idea will look like, you can go to Wikipedia. Think of Wikipedia as a huge book, an encyclopedia (it is), the book has 27 million pages, most of which are covered in blue underlined text, indicating that these words can be hyperlinks to other relevant concepts in the book. Wikipedia is the first network of books. As time goes on, when all the books are completely digitized, all the books will accumulate a large number of blue underlined passages, because each paragraph of text reference has been connected to the same book or other books in the Web. This deep, rich link will weave all the net books together, become a huge "meta book", and it is a large library containing everything. Next century, with the help of computational algorithms, academics and their fans will weave all the world's books into a big web, and readers will be able to make graphs of any of the ideas in this huge library, schedule a concept, or present an impact network for an idea. By then, we will understand that there is no work, any point of view, which is independent, that all good and real things are meshed, and that there is an ecosystem of many intertwined parts, objects, and similar works.

Wikipedia is not only a book for the whole society to read, but also a book written by the whole society, which is well known. We don't know how many more books will be written in the form of teamwork. It is clear that many of the scientific and technological works of soy milk through decentralized cooperation to complete, because science in its nature, is to rely on collaborative cooperation. However, most of the book's core content is likely to be completed by one author alone, but supporting web references, discussions, reviews, references, and hyperlinks around the edges are likely to be done through collaboration. Without such a network, books would look bare and awkward.

Soon, a complete library of all the languages and all the books in the world can be seen on any screen. There are many ways to get a book, but for most people, most of the time, any book will be free. (You need to pay monthly, get "everything you can read") get a book or it's easy, but finding a book, or getting a book to be noticed, will be difficult. So the net structure of a book will become more and more important, because the net is the way books win readers.

One of the features of a net book is that it never "finishes". A book becomes a stream of words, not a still, completed tome. Wikipedia is a "stream" of ongoing editorial processing, and everyone who has tried to quote it will understand that. Books, too, will enter a flow of state, the embryonic form of the book will be written online, and then published an earlier version, and then modify, add to the update, after the review of the birth of a new revised version. A book, not only in space, but also in time.

But why do we have to call this a book? A net book, by definition, should be the core, and the book is bound everywhere. Will the unit in this all-encompassing library be a sentence, a paragraph or a chapter, not a book? That's possible. But the long content has its own power. A self-contained story, a unified narrative, or a self-fulfilling view has a strange appeal to us. A natural sense of echo pulls a piece of net around these things. We will disassemble a book into several elements and weave these elements into a net, but the more advanced forms of the books will be realized through the center of attention. A book is a unit of attention. A fact can be interesting, an idea may be important, but there is only one story, a solid argument, a carefully carved narrative is the most attractive, can let a person photographic memory. As Muriel Rukeyser said, "The universe is made up of stories, not atoms." ”

At the moment, we are still groping to find a suitable carrier for digital books. The book liberated from the paper crust, with only a vast expanse of cyberspace, seems inadequate. The book likes the Compact of PDF, but does not like its rigid appearance, the ipad is a sense of enjoyment, the feeling is very cordial (this is the same as the content of the book), but it is still too heavy in hand. The Kindle has the ability to focus, which is what the book wants, and it, like the ipad, will have to pay for the convenience and reading interface they offer to support the author. The book can appear on any screen and can be read at any time and place that is appropriate for reading, but I think it will eventually move towards a form that is most conducive to reading.

In the long run (10-20 years), we will not pay any single book more than we currently pay for a week's song or a movie, and everything is going to be done through a paid subscription service. You mean you need to "borrow" what you want. This relieves anxiety about how to make an e-book carrier that people can have. E-books will not be owned and will only be acquired. The real challenge that we face in the future is to find a display device that allows people to focus on reading. Invent something that encourages them to read on before people's attention is attracted to other temptations. I want to achieve this and what we need will be a software hint, a highly evolved reading interface, and a combination of the most suitable hardware for reading. Also, when writing a book, the author should always consider that the book will be read on such devices.