Institute for the Future of the Book

The first stop of the Roadtrip – and a most auspicious one – was a visit to the Institute for the Future of the Book. We were invited to visit by the legendary Bob Stein, who, along with the rest of the staff, turned out to be extraordinarily gracious hosts, leading us through nearly three hours of heady conversation.

After stopping off at the Institute's home base in Williamsburg, Bob led us down the street to Monkey Town. Beyond being an excellent restaurant, Monkey Town has a fabulous back room in the shape of a cube bounded by soft seats, big screens and big audio. As someone said: "This is the best place for looking at visuals I've ever seen." The room is used for evening screenings and performances, many featuring "live mix cinema" in which visuals are produced live by VJs [video jocks], who cut, produce or mix the work in real time.

But this afternoon Bob Stein took center stage, discussing his own history and the work of the Institute. In case you didn't know, Bob was a leading visionary in the early years of multi-media – he virtually invented the CD-rom book with his Voyager Company, and he created the Criterion Collection, those cherished, uncompromised productions of classic cinema. Bob was there imagining the future before the Web was the Web. And now that it is the Web, he and his colleagues are rethinking the future of the networked book and emerging forms of digital textuality. A must-grab RSS feed for your newsreader is their excellent blog, if:book.

We discussed at length the collaborative, distributed editorial process around GAM3R 7H3ORY, a new book-in-the-making by McKenzie Wark. Wark has been writing the work in short blocks of text we once called "lexias" in the hypertext fiction days. The designer/programmers at the Institute have created an excellent interface for GAM3R 7H3ORY that facilitates editorial comment and discussion from anyone on the Web. Networked writing invites open source comment and discussion which will be folded into the final text by its author before the book is published on trees. And the book's text will remain online in the form of lexias that invite non-linear reading. This may not be the first experiment of this kind, but it certainly is the most elegantly designed and conceptually interesting.

At one point Bob looked around the room and proclaimed: "Wow, this looks like an advertisement for Apple.!" And it did:

The highlight of our visit was a preview of the soon-to-be-released book composition software being written by the Institute. It's called Sophie, and when she's released in a few weeks from this post, she'll be a free download for anyone wanting to compose their own futurebook. With page composition tools, powerful formatting features, and the integration of moving image files, Sophie seems to have a lot going for it, and anyone interested in emerging notions of textual composition, particularly those looking for a new parity between text and image, certainly will want to give it a try.

Such smart people. Such generosity. We didn't want to turn the last page with them. And we don't have to. They have invited us back in a few weeks to pick up Sophie software for our own projects. After that, when we reach the last page, we'll just click it.

Comments

[Julian Laurent]

Would you recommend that we have clocks on the sides of our shoes as well?

[Monica McCormick]

Greetings, Roadtrippers! I'm happy to be reading your blog. I am a Carl (class of '84) who recently moved into the world of digital publishing (after 15 years in university publishing). I know John Schott from doing catering with his wife Elizabeth (winter break 83?) and the Institute for the Future of the Book from going to UNC library school with if:book's Jesse Wilbur (as well as Kevin Clare, Carleton '04). Sounds like you've had a great start to your trip. I look forward to news of your further adventures. Wish I could join you, but thanks for blogging.