The design consultancy firm IDEO has created the above concept video showcasing three visions of the future of digital books. Their three concepts–called Nelson, Coupland and Alice–take three forums of interaction (social networking, the workplace and interactive entertainment) and build a reading concept around them. And check out the slick tablet IDEO’s imagined all this taking place on.
The siloed approached–building reading concepts for particular uses or forums–seems pretty, er, novel. What do you think? Is this how it’s going to look a few years down the road? Are folks doing this already? We’re still waiting for Copia to launch, but it’s got some of this functionality…
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I agree with VED. In addition, with Nelson, I wonder who is selecting all that ancillary material. How is it different from reading Web links on the Internet, which we can do already? Coupland sounds like a host of business buzz words, rather like the way dot-com promoters sounded, their substance muffled. (Wny, for instance, is it a good idea for a few colleagues to buy a book, then have it available — for free — to those who hadn’t decided to read it yet?) And listening to the video, I wondered, why does Alice’s narrator have a British accent?
I suppose that these new ways of reading will appeal to some, but it makes me want to reach for a book of poetry that was set by hand and to take solace in its quiet and simple pages.
We already can’t concentrate to read long text. This feeds right into that trend. And, why bother reading the whole book: just read the parts everyone else is reading and follow the crowd. Who needs original thought. It looks flashy – but for really gaining information and insight from text, it’s not going to make anything better. (Thank you Nicholas Carr)