Apr
1
Yesterday I attended the BISG NEXT Conference where participants tried to delineate what a publishers program would look like in 2020. One of the highpoints was a talk by Brian O’Leary from Magellan Media. One note that resonated in me was that when a book is put into its physical version, the links to the process that created it are severed. More recently, with ebooks in particular, but also with other formats, publishers have tried to re-establish the links that were severed, for example links in footnotes to contributing sources. Instead, publishers should try to maintain the context links from the beginning, not cut and then relink later as you can never relink everything. An example of this would be to have the book be a souvenir of an experience, either from a website someone has enjoyed, a conference, or some other event. This was just one of a number of great points Brian made in his talk, which he has also given at the Internet Archive’s “Books in Browsers” conference and O’Reilly’s “Tools of Change” conference.
Brian’s talk:
http://vimeo.com/20179653
