ENTRIES TAGGED "Atlas"
Forking the book
How long will it be before the book becomes "unstable" again?
As one of the first mass produced industrial artifacts the book remains a solid cultural signifier of stability. That aura is pretty strong and attractive and makes it pretty hard to think about books as being anything other than static and stable. It appears to be part of their DNA.
While we continue to refer to ebooks as ‘books’ stability seems to be carried on as part of the currency. We don’t really even challenge it. EPUBs and mobi (etc.) with their ‘self -contained’ exactly reproducible nature also appear to reinforce the static nature of things.
Books are stable. Websites are not. That seems to be a delimiter that’s ‘in the air’.
We’ve got the tools. Let’s start using them.
Today's technologies used for tomorrow's content creation and development tools
Our industry has made significant investments in production systems over the years. We’ve all had to evolve from print-only to the various digital formats (e.g., PDF, mobi, EPUB, web, apps, etc.). I’m always amazed to think about how the emphasis has always been on the back end and yet most of us are still using the same authoring and editing tools today that we used 20 years ago. Sure, new versions of those tools have been released in that time but have they really evolved as much as our production systems have? I don’t think so.