How the e-Book will Change the Way we Read and Write
Steve Johnson over at WSJ makes some interesting speculations about how the book industry could change. He writes about the “aha” moment he had with the Kindle, which everyone that reviews a Kindle has. (I haven’t seen that much negative “aha” moments when people write about the Kindle.) Here’s his take on how with the marriage of Google, books could become into some sort of “booklog”:
With books becoming part of this universe, “booklogs” will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, “In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.”) You’ll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage’s true meaning.
Via Kottke.org
