The Institute for the Future of the Book is a think-tank studying the impact of the shift from print media to networked screen-based media. According to founder Bob Stein, this shift is redefining what we think of as a book, as text becomes a social process. “Unlike the printed book,” say members of the Institute, “the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress.”
Future books, the Institute suggests, will provide greater interactivity between readers and writers, as exemplified by online “book clubs” in which a selected panel of readers creates a dialogue about the text. Authors and readers will occupy the same (digital) space, and both reading and writing become collaborative exercises similar to a role-playing game in terms of development. Future readers will pay for the pleasure of social interaction (in the form of membership to groups), suggests Stein, rather than for a physical object. Interestingly, the interactivity the future of the book would actually return the book to the collaborative processes of ages past, in which it was the norm for a book to be the product of many inputs.
The Institute for the Future of the Book brings up questions more complicated than what a book is and will be. What is driving these changes to the way we read: technology, the market, or desire? Is digitality an inherently social experience or an individualized one? What will we gain from a social or interactive reading of a text? What will we lose? The Institute believes “it is crucial to consider [the] social and political consequences, both today and in the long term” of the future of the book.
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