With apologies for not posting this sooner, here are the thoughts of Keith Pretty, Associate Lecturer in Business Development at Bournemouth, on the morning session. The video he links to on You Tube is fascinating!
A blurry future for the book or whatever we call it…
The morning presentations have been fascinating. They have built on my existing knowledge and thoughts, as well as extending the issues and opportunities for further research.
The future is uncertain and this says a lot to me about our true digital natives [born post 2010!]:
Baby trying to use a magazine as an iPad
Interestingly they can work the ‘device’ in terms of turning pages, which they must learn from interacting with physical reading artefacts.
Bob Stein highlighted a key parameter touched upon in the other presentations – the role and influence of the user interface and the associated synergies between different types of media.
This is important because I do not believe the long term future is the use of devices like the kindle for consuming only traditional text based media. I fully expect to see a future where the core design and structural principles of digital books or resources will be more multimedia in nature.
Bob Stein’s idea of a dynamic, interactive reading culture where readers and writers are not separated I fully support. In particular, the example shown of World of Warcraft and the influence of new gaming genre is having on this.
This ‘early’ research will be quoted 50 years from now, as it starts to touch on the emerging issues and predict potential futures.
I have collection of 6,000 Penguin paperbacks from 1935-65 and 1,000’s of other books. I would like to think there is still a future for the traditional book.
One of the key reasons I support this future is that we are unlikely to be able to grow enough trees or recycle enough paper fibre to match our growing world population.
I look forward to the future of the book or whatever we end up calling them 🙂