The evening of Monday, July 28th, Clark Quinn and I will be facilitating a discussion on the future of the book at the NextNow Collaboratory in Berkeley. I love books; my shelves are perpetually overflowing no matter how many cartons I give away or recycle. Nonetheless, the form of the book as we’ve known it is under severe pressure, and it’s not just the people who don’t believe in sending the world’s forests to paper mills.
As part of my prep for the discussion and to satisfy my lust for cool gadgets, I bought a Kindle ebook from Amazon. I popped it out of its book-like box fifteen minutes ago. I’m sold. Devices like this will co-exist with books, not replace them, but they will be significant.Very significant.
What do I like about the Kindle thus far? The screen resolution is great. Better still, there’s a button to bump up (or down) the size of the text. The Kindle feels good in the hand; it comes with a cover that could fool others into thinking that you’re reading a real book instead of a screen. Navigation is intuitive.
I plugged the unit in. One of the initial items on screen was a message from Jeff Bezos. So far, ho hum. I clicked open the message. “Dear Jay,” if began. I took Jeff’s instructions and visited the store. Kindle recommended half a dozen books, the same personalized recommendations I would have gotten online, but still: custom recommendations, collaboratively filtered just for me. Personalization! Great!
Charlene Li’s book on web 2.0, Groundswell, was one of the recommendations. I could download Groundswell to my Kindle for $7.99 (the dead-tree version is $19.97). Click! The download was wireless and painless. The sale automatically dinged my Amazon One-Click credit card. This thing is a dangerous drug for a book junkie like me.
Tomorrow, Uta and I fly away for a week in Seward, Alaska. I intend to give the Kindle a thorough test and will provide a full report at the Future of the Book talk. (Email me if you would like to attend; admission is $20.)
My table of five here at the Future of Media Summit at the Computer History Museum analyzed Yahoo! to try out Future Exploration Network’s Strategy Tools. We looked at Yahoo! past, present, and future along the dimensions of connecivity, interfaces, relationships, services, content, and standards.
Yahoo! began as a recommender of links and became a portal which seemed to offer anything that moves. They are in relationships, services, and content. Their services might be repositioned as time-savers, offering focus in the face of google’s breadth. Their content is good when specific, e.g. PR Newswire, so again a focus on specialty areas might differentiate them. Yahoo! would like to be sticky, but it feels like a bunch of separate sights rather than an integrated portal. We couldn’t find any viable means of repositioning Yahoo1 for the flow economy.
Our advice: take Microsoft’s money. It’s $10 billion over the current market cap and we’re skeptical Yahoo! stock is going to rise.
Years ago, a pitchman on television said Alpo dog food was so healthy, he fed it to his own dogs. Among software developers, using one’s own programs became known as eating the dog food. Don’t just talk about something. Do it. Eat the dog food.
My forthcoming un-book is about getting things done in organizations, so I thought it would be cute to call it Eating the Dog Food.
This morning my friend Gunnar Brückner in Berlin cautioned me not to use the eating the dog food metaphor outside of the US. Gunnar, a former honcho with the United Nations Development Program, has worked in many cultures. For most of them, “the idea of eating dogfood is just too hard to swallow.”
I’m glad I found this out before release. Better to bite into an apple and find a worm than to bite in and find half a worm.
So now I’m searching for a new name. Help me out here.
See if you can match the word cloud to the blog of: Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, Learning Circuits, Ross Mayfield, Donald Clark, David Weinberger, Marcia Connor, George Siemens, Curt Bonk, Dave Gray, Robin Good, informl.com, internettime.com, Mark Oehlert, and internettime.ning.
Text books cost a fortune these days. And they don’t age well. And they don’t contain local information.
This morning I had a chat with former textbook publisher executive Erik Frank, who’s out to change the situation. He and another text veteran formed Flat World Knowledge to reverse the tide.
Flat World proposes to offer e-texts by known authors to students for free. (Students will pay for print & audio versions of the text, podcast study guides, mobile phone flash cards, etc.) Books will be printed on demand.
On Monday, Flat World goes beta with four business textbooks at 15 universities. They hope to have eight texts available for the ‘09 school year. David Wiley is their “chief openness officer.”
Erik described a “social learning network” students could join to study with one another; this struck me as a potential ghost town. My suggestion: offer a social network that enables instructors to swap ideas around a the topic of the text.
Can Flat World claw its way into the hidebound world of academic publishing? I’m skeptical. Then again, Erik and his co-founder have three decades of experience with traditional publishers, so maybe they have an edge. I still remember being required to buy pricey books written by my professors. Argh. I wish Flat World well.
Michael Pollan has such a great perspective on eating and food that I stopped writing a book of my own about the topic. Cartesian viewpoint: we win; nature is diminished. It doesn’t have to be this way.
“What if human consciousness isn’t the end-all and be-all of Darwinism? What if we are all just pawns in corn’s clever strategy game, the ultimate prize of which is world domination? Look at things from a plant’s-eye view — consider the possibility that nature isn’t opposed to culture, that biochemistry rivals intellect as a survival tool. By merely shifting our perspective, he argues, we can heal the Earth. Who’s the more sophisticated species now?”
Am I the dupe of my lawn? We are all being manipulated by corn. We are part of corn’s scheme for world domination.
* * *
From the book, In Defense of Food, here are Pollan’s twelve commandments for the serious eater:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
1. “Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
2. “Avoid foods containing ingredients you can’t pronounce.”
3. “Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot.”
4. “Avoid food products that carry health claims.”
5. “Shop the peripheries of the supermarket; stay out of the middle.”
6. “Better yet, buy food somewhere else: the farmers’ market or CSA.”
7. “Pay more, eat less.”
8. “Eat a wide variety of species.”
9. “Eat food from animals that eat grass.”
10. “Cook, and if you can, grow some of your own food.”
11. “Eat meals and eat them only at tables.”
12. “Eat deliberately, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.”
I am a wanderer, enthusiastically trudging wherever my curiosity leads me. In Australia last month, a client gave me a copy of Smart World, Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle. The author uses stories of Watson & Crick, Ruth Handler & the Barbie Doll, Picasso & cubism, and Frank Gehry to enrich his speculation on the sources of intuition and imagination. Permit me to lead you down the path.
Ogle’s concept of nodes as idea spaces are a piece in the puzzle being decoded by Rob Cross, Ross Dawson, Valdis Krebs, Duncan Watts, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Verna Allee, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Albert Laszlo-Barabasi, George Siemens, David Weinberger, Ross Mayfield, and others. Ogle’s focus is innovation; top business leaders put innovation, well, top on their lists of priorities.
Harvard B-School’s Andrew McAfee has posted an article and a link to a free HBR article on Investing in the IT That Makes a Difference.
The gist of the article is that two new wrinkles in corporate IT that have sprung up in the past twenty years, the web and enterprise software, have enabled companies to take good ideas— improved business processes, sets of workflows, plans about who should get to make which decisions, etc.— and propagate them widely and with very high fidelity. Success begets success; rich companies get richer; and losers fall by the wayside. He says,
After 14 years of enthusiastic living, our longhaired miniature dachshund Smokey passed on to the great puppy farm in the sky last night.
From the Acknowledgments section of Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance, “Special recognition is due to… Smokey the Wonderdog, who was always cheerful, got me up mornings, never doubted that I would pull this off, and was a constant source of inspiration.”
Smokey appeared on the first slide of most of my presentations from 2004 to 2007.
What do I like about the Kindle thus far? The screen resolution is great. Better still, there’s a button to bump up (or down) the size of the text. The Kindle feels good in the hand; it comes with a cover that could fool others into thinking that you’re reading a real book instead of a screen. Navigation is intuitive.
