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At age 28, Elon Musk co-founded popular e-payment company Paypal. He went on to start SpaceX, the first private company to launch a rocket into space, and Tesla Motors, which builds electric cars. CNN's Amar Bakshi talked to Musk about inventions he thinks will change the world. His predictions are

1. A fully reusable orbital rocket
2. Rapid, low-cost, perfect DNA sequencing
3. Viable fusion

How big are you thinking? What’s your outrageous idea that will change the world of publishing? What are you doing today to make it happen?

Does “the cloud” pose another opportunity for book publishers? The chart above indicates that demand for wireless access to the Web is only going to grow in the coming years, as will the diversity of devices used for that function.

Book publishers, organizations, agents, and authors should be thinking now, not only how to profitably publish content for ereader consumption of complete downloaded books, but also ways of monetizing content that resides dynamically and virtually in the Internet cloud. One idea: paid subscriptions, taking a cue from the new paywall business model announced by The New York Times (by the way, here’s an analysis of the announcement by Bloomberg Businessweek and broad coverage links by paidContent).

The New York Times is banking on the strength of its brand, even though people may be able to get the (relatively) same news free elsewhere (see 10 Ways To Get Around Online News Subscriptions And Paywalls). But it may work better with book publishers, since each publishers’ content is (relatively) unique from others.

What do you think?

You'll remember we highlighted Information Theory in our March 8 blog post. Another review of that concept is written by Wally Metts on his blog "the daysman." Here's an excerpt:

What is the relationship between information and wisdom? How do we handle the flood of “information,” especially if we are simply addicted to surprise? Frankly, never have we known so much and understood so little. There is so much information we can manage the pieces but fail to see the patterns.

Read the post in full.

Since the publishing industry is involved in the dissemination of information (also known as content), it’s now time for some real deep thinking (wow your friends with it at your next book launch party). Tim Manners (@timmanners) of Cool News of the Day (@cool_news) reports the following:

Information theory “proposes that reality is composed not of matter but of bits of information,” reports John Horgan in a Wall Street Journal review of The Information, by James Gleick (@JamesGleick). This is a mathematical theory of information, based on a 1948 paper by Claude Shannon, who was working for Bell Laboratories a the time. In it, Claude “gave information an almost magically precise, quantitative definition: The information in a message is inversely proportional to its probability. Random ‘noise’ is quite uniform; the more surprising a message, the more information it contains.”

Read this in full.

We at Somersault believe in the power of strategic market research and strongly recommend it to our clients. But these funny videos demonstrate how focus groups and other research techniques shouldn’t be superficially taken on face value; they need to be carefully prepared and analyzed so as to never kill your innovative, necessary, and game-changing ideas.

Chart of the Day (@chartoftheday) compares current tablet ownership with the world population. Two extremes, granted, but not so far-fetched when you compare with mobile subscribers.

The potential for growth in the tablet market for Apple, Google, RIM, and others is still massive. Only 0.3% of the Earth's inhabitants owned a tablet at the end of 2010, RBC analyst Mike Abramsky notes today in a detailed, 88-page report about the future of the tablet market. That means 99.7% of the people on Earth still haven't bought a tablet yet!

Read this in full.

What do you think the implications are for publishers, agents, ministries, organizations, and authors as you go about creating content?

“The Living Legacy of the Bible” exhibit is part of KJV400, Nelson Bible’s (@NelsonBibles) unprecedented 400 day celebration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version of the Bible.

The exhibit allows attendees to experience first-hand more than 4,000 years of Bible history, from the time of Abraham to the present day. Artifacts in the exhibit include Dead Sea Scroll fragments, cuneiform tablets, numerous historic Bibles, an original 1611 KJV Bible, and much more.

The #1 selling Bible translation of all time, the King James Version was first published May 2, 1611. Unparalleled in its theological, literary, and cultural magnitude, the KJV continues to inspire people from all walks of life and faith traditions.

At the start of 2011, Somersault produced an interactive Infographic featuring 22 landmark anniversaries in the areas of publishing, innovation, and technology occuring this year, one of which is the 400th anniversary of the KJV Bible. Read the news release.

See more photos of "The Living Legacy of the Bible" exhibit.

See more photos of the NRB 2011 Convention.

TIME magazine (@TIME) features futurist Raymond Kurzweil’s (see his website) “radical vision for humanity’s immortal future.” It has seismic implications for those of us in book publishing. Book formats morphing into digital entities may not be the only sea change occurring in this century. Here are a few excerpts:

Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It’s an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don’t have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer ... is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.

Kurzweil (@KurzweilAINews) believes we're approaching [the Singularity,] a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away.

So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.

Read this in full.

Meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice — the faces of tomorrow’s book. Watch global design and innovation consultancy IDEO’s (@ideo) vision for the future of the book. It explores the new experiences that might be created by linking diverse discussions; the additional value that could be created by connecting readers to one another; and the innovative ways that might be used to tell favorite stories and build community around books. Watch the video.