Yesterday, I posted about the release of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, now available in digital, print and bundled formats. The book includes 27 chapters presented across three sections, the first two of which were published digitally as the sections were finished.
The third section, made available this week as part of the complete book, consists of 11 new chapters that describe “Things we can do with books: Projects from the bleeding edge”. The contributions include:
- Communities of writers (Jurgen Fauth)
- Books as apps, really? (Neal Hoskins)
- The engagement economy (Bobby Gruenwald)
- How do books get discovered? (Patrick Brown, Kyusik Chung and Otis Chandler)
- The surprising power of “little data” (Peter Collinridge)
- Exaggerations and perversions (Valla Vakili)
- Pain and its alleviation (John Oakes)
- The end of the public library (as we knew it?) (Eli Neiburger)
- Now is the time for experiments (Ian Barker)
- The forgotten consumer (Jacob Lewis)
- A conversation that can’t be controlled (Sarah Wendell)
As Hugh wrote in the introduction to the full book, the third section covers:
“… those brave souls who have already plunged into the future: those who do more than think and talk and write about “the future of the book”, those who have some skin in the game, with projects, passions, technologies and enterprises struggling to explore the future now.”
(I tried to get Hugh to drop the line about doing more than “think, talk and write”, but he wouldn’t budge.)
The entire book is available online, where you can read it for free. The links for each of the chapters bring you to the PressBooks site that was used to write, edit and publish both the earlier sections and the full book. There, you can also comment on any of the chapters.
Throughout the project, Hugh has been committed to keeping the book open and available. I applaud his commitment, and I encourage you to read it where you want. That said, please think about buying a copy. The proceeds help cover the development costs for the PressBooks platform, a tool that was instrumental in our collaborative effort to bring this collection to fruition.
