DSCF1087Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick of Wired

Just published a book, What Technology Wants, and it’s the last paper book he’ll write. Talk about what’s ahead. 6 trends: 1. Screening, moving from being people of the book to people of the screen. Surrounded by screens, find them everywhere. Times Square with all its amazing screens is probably the future. Screens are ubiquitous in the environment and this is the context in which we will be publishing books. Shouldn’t think of ebooks as just one page. There is no reason that e-ink with flexible screens couldn’t be bound into a book, for example. All context is going through a screen – one screen for everything and must understand this because a lot of stuff will compete on the screen. Maybe should use word “screening”. 2. Interacting: can interact with screens in too many ways to count. Audio books. This is another dimension in the sensuality of reading. Have eyeballs in all these tablets, phones, etc. and they will see things. Easy to imaging our books looking back at us and as we read them they become adaptive to what we are doing. This idea of adaptive text has been around before and was called interactive media and it failed but, in fact, the idea of a multiple path through a book has succeeded in games, which are a larger seller than books. Far more reading going on in games than we think. 3. Sharing: these windows look at the cloud and the cloud is looking back at us. Reading will become a more social activity. Marginalia can be shared. Going to see books become more and more social. Wikipedia gives us some sense of linking between books. Can look at it as one very large book or as many small books interlinked together. Wikipedia has a lot of social writing which is complementary to social reading. Only at the very beginning of sharing. 4. Accessing (not owning): people are starting to get more value out of accessing something rather than owning it. Look at Netflix and Pandora, for example. For $20K can store every book ever written and for $500 can store all the published music. 5. Flowing: stream, tag and cloud. In this metaphor things flow through, are not pages. Flow in real time like Twitter. Books will operate in this environment. Books will flow in streams, be constantly updated, constantly amended. Our lives will become streams of chronologically organized data. The streams will be real time, always on, never done. 6. Generating, not copying: never been a better time to be a reader than now. Renaissance for reading. Everyone is benefiting from this new era except the producers. Everything is moving to the free. For example get a free Kindle if buy so many books. Even if doesn’t reach free will get to the time when it is just the same as free – for example a $0.99 for a book. Why should a book be more expensive than a song. Internet is world’s largest copy machine and anything that can be copied will be copied. What do we do? Only things that will be valuable are things that can’t be copied easily or cheaply. For example: immediacy. For free something can be downloaded in an hour, for 1 minute download you pay. Personalization, music free, but want it equalized to your listening room you pay. Emobodyment is another example. Music is free, pay to see it live. Many other examples of this.

1 COMMENT

  1. Kelly is calling products “free” that aren’t free at all… he’s reacting to the “creative financing” created for broadcast media (TV and radio) like a 2-year-old who thinks that only what is in front of him actually exists. The artificial values he postulates (pay for fast downloads, etc) won’t last, because better technology and competition eventually eradicates those pay possibilities, and all that’s left is the content. Better figure out how to make the content valuable, or you’re fighting a losing battle.

    And the Times Square analogy is a century behind. Gathering crowds into one location to berate them with huge, flashy billboards is a 20th century solution to 20th century social systems. 21st century technology reaches into everyone’s pocket, no matter where they are, and can tailor messages to individuals through their medium of choice, as opposed to 20th century crowd-shouting.

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