1) Screening — ubiquitous screens everywhere, and all things on every screen. We are becoming people of the screen

we’ve been people of the book (author – authority) now we’re becoming people of the screen. screens will become cheap enough to be put up anywhere. who thought 30 years ago that we would read books on screens. it would have made no sense. now it does. don’t assume that i-ink, flexible pages cannot be bound into books. it’s too early to say. the screen is a portal into a machine for websites, email, a film, music, images, a mixture of both etc. it’s one screen for everything. books are just one thing in that environment

from orality to literacy to visuality – the merging of image and text. tv we read; books that we watch; things that are screened. a fully transmedia world.

2) Interacting — we’ll interact with books with gestures, voices, hands, and in non-linear modes

the future of books? look at a toddler with an ipad. it’s going to get more like minority report – immersive environment where reading continues to expand so that we do it with more of our body. voice will be used more. it’s already popular – sales have increased by 5% a year for years. the sensuality of reading. eyeballs (cameras) are in everything and they will be in our books. they’ll track out into the environment and in towards us- tracking our reading habits through sensing our eyeballs and adapt to us.

interactive used to be about non-linear, multi-pathways through texts – it failed – everyone thought that what people wanted was linear stories. But not in games – in games this kind of interactivity has been successful and the popularity of games amongs the young compete with books.

3) Sharing — reading will become an increasing social activity, and books will weave together into a shared library

we look into the cloud and the cloud looks back at us. reading has been a lone, private, solitary activity. it will return to being a much more social activity

marginalia can be shared – more social

hyperlinks – books to books – but we already have it if we think of wikipedia as a load of books linked to each other. the library will be the one text into which all books are linked

we read socaiilaly and we are beginging to write socially. it’s early. we have no idea where it will go

4) Accessing — shifting from owning books to having instant, constant access to books

huge shift in the entire environment where there is more value to accessing than to owning. last.fm, sharing sites … see collaborative consumption

the price of storage is so low that there’ll be so many copies – why own it if you have access

5) Flowing — moving away from static, fixed pages to streams and flows, as in Twitter, RSS feeds, Facebook walls, Netflix, lifeblogs.

the metaphors for describing our digital worlds are changing:

we went from files to pages to streams

from folders to links to tags

from the desktop to the web to the cloud

very compatible with the book – web pages after all. but now we have streams not pages – flows of data that go by in real time. books will move from pages to clouds around data – books will flow through streams, constantly updated by authors and readers and our own lives and we’ll live in that environment with books. and it’s always on. everything is constantly in flux, never finished.

6) Generating — value will come from uncopyable attributes generated around books instead of in copies of books.

it’s a great time to be a reader. but what of the producer? what’s the model that can benefit the producer. in a world where everything is moving to the free there has to be a re-thinking of where value comes from. why don’t books cost the same as a song? the digital is inherently copiable so the value doesn’t come from the commodity itself. the value has to be generated elsewhere.value comes from the things that are easy to pay and hard to copy.

a. immediacy – if you want it now, you pay

b. personalisation – music personalised to the acoustics of your living room – in you language

c. authentication – the ‘real’ copy

d. findability – I pay amazon because the find me the book I want

e. embodiment – the concert, the performance cannot be copied and is easy to pay for

f. accessibility – iTunes makes it easy to download and manage music – that why we pay 99c for a song we could download for free elsewhere

g. interpretation – i can download the software for free but the manual costs money because that will interpret how I can get value out of the free bit of software

h. attention – somebody will pay if you are giving them attention. a form of patronage

this is value that must be generated in context

** this is relevant to the teaching content where open content will be the norm and free but the interpretation and