Hugh McGuire (@hughmcguire and @bookoven) writes about media, publishing, mass collaboration, and technology. In this post on O'Reilly Radar, he says "the distinction between the 'Internet' & 'books' is totally totally arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now."
He says "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." He says "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?"
He challenges book publishers to go beyond "mere" ebooks and create an API for books to reside on the Web. He says,
An API is an Application Programming Interface.' It's what smart Web companies build so that other innovative companies and developers can build tools and services on top of their underlying databases and services.... We are a long, long way from publishers thinking of themselves as API providers -- as the Application Programming Interface for the books they publish. But we've seen countless times that value grows when data is opened up (sometimes selectively) to the world. That's really what the Internet is for; and that is where book publishing is going. Eventually.
Read his article in full. Also read the comments.