Wired has Steven Levy and a baker’s dozen authors, publishers and spirit-channels (how else to include McLuhan?) reacting to the Apple iPad’s arrival this month: “How the tablet will change the world.”
Over at FutureOfTheBook.org, Bob Stein adds to what he had to say in Wired, under the heading “Follow the gamers.” See this for background on Bob.
I still have a stack of Stein’s pioneering e-books, which combined text, graphics, audio and video on CD-ROMS or DVDs before we had devices that allowed comfortable reading from a screen. I wish my new OS-X Macintosh would run OS-9 to play them.
See if:book: follow the gamers — my piece in the april Wired.
I met Bob Stein almost 10 years ago, when he was working on an e-book authoring/reading system called TK3 (more about it here), but somehow I lost track of his projects. Archive.org shows his company’s last page here. I wonder what happened. It looks like Sophie is its new incarnation. In fact, checking my bookmark lists, I see I saved a link to it in 2006! So much software, so little time. Still, it will be good to catch up when I have time for more browsing.
Speaking of catching up, Stein’s observation about how long it took to get from Gutenberg to Cervantes reminded me someone else I met around the same time — Mitchell Stephens, whose “the rise of the image, the fall of the word“ would be a great candidate for a multimedia e-book treatment itself.
