Saturday, September 11, 2010

The Line Between Book and Internet to Disappear?

Hugh McGuire, O'Reilly Radar: "A few months ago I posted a tweet that said: 'The distinction between the internet & books is totally totally arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now.' The tweet got some negative reaction. But I'm certain this shift will happen, and should happen (I won't take bets on the timeline though). It should happen because a book properly hooked into the Internet is a far more valuable collection of information than a book not properly hooked into the Internet. And once something is "properly hooked into the internet," that something is part of the Internet. It will happen, because: what is a book, after all, but a collection of data (text + images), with a defined structure (chapters, headings, captions), meta data (title, author, ISBN), and prettied up with some presentation design? In other words, what is a book, but a website that happens to be written on paper and not connected to the web?... "