Academic books are a means of scholarly communication, and in the digital world we can promote communication much better than in print. We are already engaging in experiments with Social Reading to make books the place for an exchange of ideas among students and lecturers, between authors and readers.
Books of the future will both be definitive and citable, but also subject to faster change in the digital world. Third , we need a better understanding of how people read, learn and use our books.
Some are interested in the full book, others only want the answer to a very specific question. We will offer much more accurate solutions to the needs of our readers. Fifth , we provide more help to authors in the process of writing books, a better workflow experience, better tools to assist the creation of new knowledge, and internally better technology to assess the quality and scientific integrity of books.
Of course, we are also looking at more fundamental technological challenges like long term storage and preservation of books, machine-generated abstracts, reading in the virtual reality, but these are very much for the long term future. Books have proven in the last ten years that they are open for change — and there is no reason to believe that their evolution is complete.
But at Springer Nature our commitment to maintaining the authority of a traditional book while combining it with the possibilities presented by new technology, that goes beyond simple digitalization, is a good indicator that we will continue to meet the demands of authors, researchers and librarians with the books fit for the future. Niels-Peter received a combined degree in electrical engineering and economics at Darmstadt University of Technology.
He has 10 years of experience in the publishing industry in Germany and China as he started at Springer in Heidelberg in , relocated to Beijing in and since has been based in Wiesbaden, Germany.
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How to calculate the temperature change of a laser-irradiated material 15 hours ago. One way speed of light in one reference frame measurement 16 hours ago. Using Diffraction i. Why can't gravity be just a form of magnetic attraction? Nov 10, Does this seem correct? Related Stories. The Future Book would change depending on where you were, how you were feeling. It would be sly, maybe a little creepy. Definitely programmable. Ulysses would extend indefinitely in any direction you wanted to explore; just tap and some unique, mega-mind-blowing sui generis path of Joycean machine-learned words would wend itself out before your very eyes.
Prognostications about how technology would affect the form of paper books have been with us for centuries. Each new medium was poised to deform or murder the book: newspapers, photography, radio, movies, television, videogames, the internet.
Researcher Alan Kay created a cardboard prototype of a tablet-like device in In the s, Future Bookism hit a kind of beautiful fever pitch. We were so close. Normal books? Future Books?
Awesome—indeterminate—and we were almost there! The Voyager Company built its "expanded books" platform on Hypercard, launching with three titles at MacWorld But … by the mids, there still were no real digital books.
The Rocket eBook was too little, too early. Sony launched the eink-based Librie platform in to little uptake. We had Wikipedia, blogs, and the internet, but the mythological Future Book—some electric slab that would somehow both be like and not like the quartos of yore—had yet to materialize. And then there was. Several devices, actually. The iPhone launched in June , the Kindle that November. Then, in , the iPad arrived.
And for a brief moment during the early s, it seemed like it might finally be here: the glorious Future Book. Fast forward to The world keeps turning. But maybe by the time you read it. Passed away in I was reading this story—part of his collection The Largesse of the Maiden —on my Kindle, during a many-day hike.
Hiking with a Kindle definitely feels futuristic—an entire library in a device that weighs less than a small book, and rarely needs charging. Reading this same text, feeling the same impulse. Some need to mark those lines. I wanted to stick my cent eulogy between those lines for others to read, and to read what those others had thought. Purchasing a book is one of the strongest self-selections of community, and damn it, I wanted to engage.
For my Kindle Oasis—one of the most svelte, elegant, and expensive digital book containers you can buy in —is about as interactive as a potato. Physical books today look like physical books of last century. And digital books of today look, feel, and function almost identically to digital books of 10 years ago, when the Kindle launched. The digital reading and digital book startup ecosystem that briefly emerged in the early s has shriveled to a nubbin.
Amazon won. Trounced, really. Some research indicates that there is cause for concern. Research roughly indicates that print falls on one end of the reading spectrum the most immersive and that online text occurs at the other end the most distracting. Kindle reading seems to fall somewhere in the middle. The field, however, is in its infancy, and findings about the negative impacts of e-reading are far from chiseled in stone.
Indeed, some studies have produced opposite results, including that e-reading does not impact comprehension or that it can even enhance it, especially for readers with dyslexia.
Books may live on as a purely aesthetic purchase Credit: iStock. Findings are also mixed for how digital reading affects children. But the effect these additions have on reading varies depending on how they are executed. In several experiments involving more than kindergarteners, Bus and her colleagues found that kids who read animated e-books understood the story better and learned more vocabulary than those who read static ones. The recent uptick in the number of independent bookstores, at least in the US, gives her encouragement that others, too, are recognising the value of print.
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