Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller’s (@thebookseller) digital blog Futurebook (@TheFutureBook), interviewed Bob Stein, founder and co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, who insists publishers need to make books social and look for ways to “build the conversation around books.”
"The current system of publishing doesn't really support the shape publishing is taking on as it develops," says Stein, who founded The Voyager Company in 1985, the first commercial multimedia CD-ROM publisher. But publishers are chronically slow at recognising what is happening to them and grasping the opportunities before they emerge. Stein argues that the real innovation is happening left-of-centre in sectors such as gaming, where collaborative narratives have already taken root. "The future is being born outside their field of vision," he says.
"The idea of publishing is to move ideas around time and space," is how he sees it....His big idea now is "social reading", the concept that in the future texts will become one part of a much larger conversation that happens around them, with notes and context shared on a collaborative platform.
Stein is currently working on SocialBook — a reading platform that allows users to interact with texts, leave notes, and begin conversations around those books. The site will have free and paid-for areas, though the commercial model is not yet finalized. "It begins as YouTube for social documents in the free space, but then we'll build Amazon for publishing," says Stein.
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