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Book: A Futurist's Manifesto
The ground beneath the book publishing industry dramatically shifted in 2007, the year the Kindle and the iPhone debuted. Widespread consumer demand for these and other devices has brought the pace of digital change in book publishing from "it might happen sometime" to "it’s happening right now"—and it is happening faster than anyone predicted.
Yet this is only a transitional phase. Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto is your guide to what comes next, when all books are truly digital, connected, and ubiquitous. Through this collection of essays from thought leaders and practitioners, you'll become familiar with a wide range of developments occurring in the wake of this digital book shakeup:
* Discover new tools that are rapidly transforming how content is created, managed, and distributed* Understand the increasingly critical role that metadata plays in making book content discoverable in an era of abundance
* Look inside some of the publishing projects that are at the bleeding edge of this digital revolution
* Learn how some digital books can evolve moment to moment, based on reader feedback
With Book: A Futurist's Manifesto, we at O’Reilly Media are actively practicing what we preach. Written and edited on PressBooks.com, a new web-based book-production system, this book also invites reader feedback throughout its development. Read the initial chapters and tell us where you’d like to go next. Are there topics you would like us to explore? Are there areas you want to go more in-depth? Let us know!
- GenresNonfictionTechnology
318 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2011
21 people are currently reading
182 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
July 26, 2012
A great read, from Brian O'Leary's great opening article 'Context, Not containers' untill the 'readers bill of rights' by Kassia Krosser.
To be honest, only 6 articles really caught my attention, which is not a problem since you can skim through the other parts without missing out. To me the other 12 parts felt like a bonus.
The articles that did matter gave me great insight in some publishing startups, the consequences of DRM and the interdependencies between publishers and e-reader software.
The manifesto which ends it all leaves me yearning for part 3 (which is included as an update)
To be honest, only 6 articles really caught my attention, which is not a problem since you can skim through the other parts without missing out. To me the other 12 parts felt like a bonus.
The articles that did matter gave me great insight in some publishing startups, the consequences of DRM and the interdependencies between publishers and e-reader software.
The manifesto which ends it all leaves me yearning for part 3 (which is included as an update)
Want to read
August 3, 2016McGuire's the founder of LibriVox!
Awesome - Looking forward to reading more of this and all the subsequent updates.
Awesome - Looking forward to reading more of this and all the subsequent updates.
June 29, 2018
Valuable but dated
I found this book pretty interesting, as someone who regularly self-publishes ebooks and teaches others to do the same. Many of the trends and ideas included are still relevant and futuristic today, about 5 years after publication. But like all books on technology and innovation, the world has caught up, and many of the predicted trends have come and gone, or in some cases, never materialized. About 40% of the links are now dead, for example, which doesn’t bode well for the future of highly networked ebooks. I think overall it’s a great compilation, but there’s probably other more recent books that do a better job of bringing someone up to date on this quickly changing topic.
I found this book pretty interesting, as someone who regularly self-publishes ebooks and teaches others to do the same. Many of the trends and ideas included are still relevant and futuristic today, about 5 years after publication. But like all books on technology and innovation, the world has caught up, and many of the predicted trends have come and gone, or in some cases, never materialized. About 40% of the links are now dead, for example, which doesn’t bode well for the future of highly networked ebooks. I think overall it’s a great compilation, but there’s probably other more recent books that do a better job of bringing someone up to date on this quickly changing topic.
May 20, 2020
It was excellent Informant I would read it again
I enjoyed it Any was very informal I am glad that they wrote a book like this for I really appreciate it
I enjoyed it Any was very informal I am glad that they wrote a book like this for I really appreciate it
October 16, 2020
I'm reading this book over the course of my Fall 2020 semester for my first year in publishing. I'll be updating my review as I read more chapters, and as such my rating could change.
Chapter 8: Why the Book and the Internet Will Merge, Hugh Maguire (9/18/2020)
This essay is very interesting, and I find myself agreeing with Maguire. Many people hold elitist feelings towards reading print over reading digital. Some people think print words are inherently more accurate, important, and of better quality. This might be generally true, if a book is published it goes through rigorous editing. But ebooks, and digital publications are also edited, and contain interesting, high quality information. Just because digital publications share the same space as Twitter, does not mean they are lesser. I also agree that for many of us who have no training in digital reading, print reading is more appealing. But over the years I've seen myself improve with digital reading, as younger generations receive more digital reading training from a young age, these elitist feelings towards reading in formats other than print will hopefully dissipate.
It's also interesting to think about whether ebooks lacking the capabilities to copy/paste, share passages, leave comments, etc, is protecting digital rights or hindering the reader experience. On Kindle you can share passages- granted it's not a sophisticated experience yet, but you can share them.
Chapter 13: User Experience, Reader Experience (9/18/2020)
I did not find this essay easily comprehendible. The ideas were very abstract, and as such I had a hard time following the trains of thought and making connections. Overall, the author was advocating for the importance of the User Experience, and is arguing that publishers need to control products in order to control and improve the digital experience.
Chapter 8: Why the Book and the Internet Will Merge, Hugh Maguire (9/18/2020)
This essay is very interesting, and I find myself agreeing with Maguire. Many people hold elitist feelings towards reading print over reading digital. Some people think print words are inherently more accurate, important, and of better quality. This might be generally true, if a book is published it goes through rigorous editing. But ebooks, and digital publications are also edited, and contain interesting, high quality information. Just because digital publications share the same space as Twitter, does not mean they are lesser. I also agree that for many of us who have no training in digital reading, print reading is more appealing. But over the years I've seen myself improve with digital reading, as younger generations receive more digital reading training from a young age, these elitist feelings towards reading in formats other than print will hopefully dissipate.
It's also interesting to think about whether ebooks lacking the capabilities to copy/paste, share passages, leave comments, etc, is protecting digital rights or hindering the reader experience. On Kindle you can share passages- granted it's not a sophisticated experience yet, but you can share them.
Chapter 13: User Experience, Reader Experience (9/18/2020)
I did not find this essay easily comprehendible. The ideas were very abstract, and as such I had a hard time following the trains of thought and making connections. Overall, the author was advocating for the importance of the User Experience, and is arguing that publishers need to control products in order to control and improve the digital experience.
March 29, 2013
This is, as the subtitle promises, a book of essays. Consequently there’s no central theme: essayists explore the future of the book from the vantage point of their own piece of the publishing industry. I found the most value in the overall rather than the specific essays.
“It is time to see publishing as a whole—newspapers, magazines, and books—as part of a disrupted continuum. Digital makes convergence not only possible—it has made convergence inevitable. Marketers have become publishers, publishers are marketing arms, and new entrants are a bit of both. Customers have become alternately competitors, partners, and suppliers.”
The book was least interesting to me when it talked about XML and metadata, which is (of course) the delight of being an outside observer rather than a participant in the industry. I consider my life a success so long as I never have to read, write, or care about XML ever again.
I enjoyed the tripartite framing of containers (historically we filled a book with information), content (that information), and context (normally provided by third parties). Leary’s opening essay sets the tone for the book, exploring the challenges of context-first: keeping the context with the content so we can fit into any container. Help help, I’m being XMLed!
Nice story:
“It is time to see publishing as a whole—newspapers, magazines, and books—as part of a disrupted continuum. Digital makes convergence not only possible—it has made convergence inevitable. Marketers have become publishers, publishers are marketing arms, and new entrants are a bit of both. Customers have become alternately competitors, partners, and suppliers.”
The book was least interesting to me when it talked about XML and metadata, which is (of course) the delight of being an outside observer rather than a participant in the industry. I consider my life a success so long as I never have to read, write, or care about XML ever again.
I enjoyed the tripartite framing of containers (historically we filled a book with information), content (that information), and context (normally provided by third parties). Leary’s opening essay sets the tone for the book, exploring the challenges of context-first: keeping the context with the content so we can fit into any container. Help help, I’m being XMLed!
Nice story:
To illustrate that point, I want to bring you to perhaps the most hierarchical, inaccessible, closed environment I know of: an American public high school. In particular, I’d like to take you to Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, where our youngest son, Charlie, is a student. The school opened in 1927, and it has not changed much since then.
Last summer, Charlie was happy to learn that he had earned a 5 on the AP Art History exam. This made him eligible to serve as a sort of teaching assistant for this year’s Art History class. All he needed to do was align his free period with the scheduled slot for Art History.
I don’t know how many of you have tried to parse a high-school scheduling API. It seems to rely on green-screen devices, stacks of forms, and a queueing process that means you won’t have your new schedule in hand until two weeks after the start of the school year.
On a Friday in July, Charlie came home to find his junior-year schedule in the mail. His free period did not align. Charlie has seen his brother and sister fight the powers that be at Columbia High School, at times unsuccessfully, and he decided to pursue a different course.
Lacking access to the master schedule, he went to a free resource—Facebook—posted his schedule there, and asked anyone who attended Columbia High School to do the same.
By Sunday morning, he had gathered enough data to compile his own master schedule. With this information in hand, he rearranged his classes, filled out a home-made “change form”, and sent it to the high school on Monday morning. “Please give me this schedule,” it said. Problem solved.
Stories like this one … have led me to see piracy as the consequence of a bad API. 16-year-olds expect access, or they invent it.
Content is no longer just a product. It’s part of a value chain that solves readers’ problems. Readers expect publishers to poin them to the outcomes or answers they want, where and when they want them. We’re interested in content solutions that don’t waste our time, a precious commodity for all of us.
Readers expect that their content solutions will improve over time. They don’t care that much (or at all) about how it happens.
November 26, 2011
Part 1: The Setup
Mixed bag of essays aimed for the most part at medium to large scale publishing houses whose outmoded production model is in flux. While much of the content is of little use to indie authors and other content creators, the overall discussion of the changing landscape of publishing is informative and enlightening (if often pedantic and heavy-handed).
Of most value and interest for myself (as an author and independent publisher) were Liza Daly's essay on "What We Can Do with Books" (which discusses the malleable nature of digital and how interactive elements can give readers a chance to participate and explore a more immersive text), as well as Craig Mod's insightful analysis of the "post-artifact" landscape of content creation, with its direct interaction between author and reader.
Additional essays cover topics from distribution to metadata and the usual concerns with DRM. Discussions of digital workflow and context vs. content are strictly for large-scale production facilities and irrelevant to the average reader. The overall impression is of not just an industry in turmoil, but a cultural icon undergoing a fundamental change.
The ebook itself was produced using the new PressBooks conversion utility, which suffers from some inconsistent formatting, broken external links, and at least one garbled graphic on the Kindle Fire. It also currently contains only the first of three parts at this point, with the next two said to be forthcoming as free "updates" for anyone who purchases part one.
Parts 2 & 3: Coming Late 2011/Early 2012
See my full review at http://authoradventures.blogspot.com/...
Mixed bag of essays aimed for the most part at medium to large scale publishing houses whose outmoded production model is in flux. While much of the content is of little use to indie authors and other content creators, the overall discussion of the changing landscape of publishing is informative and enlightening (if often pedantic and heavy-handed).
Of most value and interest for myself (as an author and independent publisher) were Liza Daly's essay on "What We Can Do with Books" (which discusses the malleable nature of digital and how interactive elements can give readers a chance to participate and explore a more immersive text), as well as Craig Mod's insightful analysis of the "post-artifact" landscape of content creation, with its direct interaction between author and reader.
Additional essays cover topics from distribution to metadata and the usual concerns with DRM. Discussions of digital workflow and context vs. content are strictly for large-scale production facilities and irrelevant to the average reader. The overall impression is of not just an industry in turmoil, but a cultural icon undergoing a fundamental change.
The ebook itself was produced using the new PressBooks conversion utility, which suffers from some inconsistent formatting, broken external links, and at least one garbled graphic on the Kindle Fire. It also currently contains only the first of three parts at this point, with the next two said to be forthcoming as free "updates" for anyone who purchases part one.
Parts 2 & 3: Coming Late 2011/Early 2012
See my full review at http://authoradventures.blogspot.com/...
February 24, 2014
I enjoyed reading this book, and many of the chapters still hold up well over the time which has passed since publication. This is a rapidly changing area. Some of the chapters were worth fives stars, but some others changed this view. The diverse chapters provide an over view of possible futures for books, based on current information. It is not a book of scenarios, but of extrapolations from current behaviour.
June 2, 2015
Books and e-books are different
What is the difference?
paper books have been continued to read more than 2000 years .
It has been released current e-books.
Many avid readers hate e-books.
There are several functions of e-book reader that paper books cannot be.
E-books have the future of every books.
I expect them.
What is the difference?
paper books have been continued to read more than 2000 years .
It has been released current e-books.
Many avid readers hate e-books.
There are several functions of e-book reader that paper books cannot be.
E-books have the future of every books.
I expect them.
May 20, 2014
Great survey of some threads currently unraveling in the publishing world. The book is a few years old at this point but many of the articles are still relevant and the issues they address are in the same place they were years ago.
September 27, 2012
I am good in various ways
November 11, 2013
Librarians! Read this! Please.
Or at least this essay by Craig Mod, mind-blowing: http://book.pressbooks.com/chapter/bo...
Or at least this essay by Craig Mod, mind-blowing: http://book.pressbooks.com/chapter/bo...
July 1, 2013
very good!!!
Read
April 21, 2017070.5 B7241 2012
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews