Much to the chagrin of my wife, I took over the remote on our internet-enabled TV (old macbook hooked up via HD cable to the back of our flatscreen) to catch highlights from the Web 2 Summit taking place this week in San Francisco.
Steven Berlin-Johnson’s “high order bit” on the early history of book “technology” and lessons it provides for opportunities for e-book publishers today was most compelling. The Kindle represents the most advanced form of electronic packaging of ideas today. Kindle books ship with a full index, mp3 sound files of the book being read, instant download and connections to related data via the web.
What’s missing? Deep links to ideas within the book so that it can be used as a reference. The internet didn’t really take off until (1) The World Wide Web made it easy to link to other sites and pages and, (2) Google figured out by ranking the number of links to a page and the keywords used, they could calculate PageRank.
I wrote about two concept videos which suggested one possible Future of Print. If someone isn’t working on this now, they should.
Amazon, are you listening?
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