Somehow or other I found my way to this Mike Cane post from July of this year. It’s brilliant stuff – answering the question: what happens when we get over the “will books be digital” bother, and on to the real stuff: What happens next?
Mike argues for, and I am with him all the way, a digital book where every word/sentence is associated with metadata.
All of this hidden information — exploded out like that, made explicit — turns an ebook from a dumb object into a smart object.
Further, it’s then possible to associate it with other such objects in ways that are not currently possible. It would enable queries such as these:
Show me all mystery fiction books set in Los Angeles in the year 1945.
Show me all romance fiction books set in Maine in the year 2009.
Show me all fiction books set on Mars in any fictional year, published between 1940 and 1960.
…
It seems to me that the challenge is to make it easy to build this new layer “on top” of a book (epub or whatever digital format).
Maybe: (e)book as API.
That is, the book itself – epub or whatever – maintains its essential bookish quality, but we “allow” the building of a new layer of metadata/multimedia etc on top of the “book itself”. Wikipedia with increasingly semantic mark-up is a nice analogy – where you have the “electronic encyclopedia” that 99% of the people *just read* but behind it you have oodles of metadata in addition to discussion in addition to a history.
More from Mike:
This would open up book discovery in a way that’s just not possible with today’s crude and coarse methods. It would enable scholarship that has been impossible. It would give eBooks more possibilities than anyone today can envision — or should try to envision….
With such exploded data, an eBook is not just an eBook — it becomes a ticket for admission to a vast collection of databased information.
An eBook becomes a local terminal connected to a growing and living cloud of associated information, with meanings and implications no publisher or writer can currently imagine. It lets the reader make those connections. It’s an eBook that can do something.
and:
Print publishing freezes information into a static object — an object that dies a little with each passing day. An object that stands alone, disconnected, unable to do anything.
and:
It’d no longer be a flat, linear collection of words. Dimensions have been added to it that breathe and grow. The eBook price –again — becomes a ticket. People are no longer buying an object — they are also buying into an ongoing experience.
7 Comments
“With such exploded data, an eBook is not just an eBook — it becomes a ticket for admission to a vast collection of databased information.” Brilliant, yes, yes, yes.
“Print publishing freezes information into a static object — an object that dies a little with each passing day. An object that stands alone, disconnected, unable to do anything.” Wrong. Which among us does not need a snapshot, a freeze in time to actually open up to, absorb, analyze and reflect on an idea. Print books are perfect for that purpose.
As I see it, e-books are metadata for print books.
Right. A book is a kind of package:
1. text
2. associated media (images, audio, video)
3. visual design
4. metadata
Digital allows us to explicitly separate those 4 things, and use the parts we want to use for the purposes we wish to use them. Again, book as a set of data + API …
The fundamental bit is that text that underpins the whole thing … but that text needn’t be static – if it is encouraged to interact with all the rest.
Ebooks will do to books what the web did to information.
Today’s ereaders will be looked back upon as the 8088 PCs of their time, we will wonder how in the world we could do anything with them other than read.
We are not good at foreseeing the scope of the change that is likely to happen during the coming development of things like ereaders. A book that can look up any term, word, or concept at a simple touch is worth more than a private library of congress.
Like the internet in your pocket, and hopefully without all the distraction of advertisements and annoying imagery, a proper ereader will be able to cross index information from any book, past or present, bringing all mankind’s knowledge within the reach of every person.
The same promise was offered by the Internet, but it has descended into ghetto (present website excepted, of course) of loud advertisers, flame wars, spammers, and pornographers.
The real question here is how do we prevent the same from happening to our books?
Libraries actually do attach metadata to books (subject headings) but the cutback in cataloging positions at the Library of Congress and other libraries combined with the general inadequacy of subject headings mean it’s of limited use. Open Library and Library Thing for Libraries are interesting models for enhancing metadata through crowd-sourced tagging. However you slice, it, though, it means work: people interpreting and tagging. Who will spend the time and how well already-published books will be systematically tagged…. and will publishers do this work for new books, and do it well in their spare time? That’s another matter.
Hi Barbara, Indeed this is exactly what libraries have done – managed, classified, and metadataified books, and the wealth of information around them so that the rest of us mortals can easily get access to them. But in the non-digital world, the managable amount of that data was limited, and further, the information was not (really) contained in the book *itself*, but rather associated.
The promise of digital & the network is: a) unlimited “space” for metadata, meaning b) the ability to include all metadata along with the book itself, and c) freedom of “anyone” to add relevant metadata.
But yes, how this happens, and who does it is a question worth pondering. I suspect the librarian’s job might become in part managing this mass aggregation of reader-generated metadata … something our friends at Google no doubt are already planning.
hugh said:
> something our friends at Google
> no doubt are already planning.
google is not just “already planning” it,
it is already _doing_ it, as you speak…
but google is the only entity with all the data.
and until you have _all_ the data, you have none.
which is why publishers cannot do this themselves.
(they also have neither the money nor the expertise,
let alone the courage or the audacity or the brains.)
his “metadata” phase was mike cane at his most insane.
mikey wanted everyone to jump into his big black hole.
i’m surprised he got a big fish like you, hugh, to bite…
-bowerbird
Reading this made me think of the Stanza app, which I use on the iPhone all the time.
That app gives the user the ability to highlight text, and then make notes about the text.
What I think would be great is if I could somehow share the notes that I’ve done to text, and see the notes that other users have done as well.
Also, it would be great to be able to highlight a word and then match it to any Flickr pictures that are tagged with that same (highlighted) word.
-Neil