Book Kismet

I have been thinking about the challenge of integrating physical and digital worlds via [social books] and I have a suggestion.  I think you need to be designing at a higher level of abstraction: really, designing a standard instead of a device.

Think about it this way.

Class of physical Enablers

Class of entity-level citation schemes, e.g.

Class of “pinpoint” citation services, e.g.

Class of web resources

Class of web services

Right now, we have a variety of entities pursuing efforts to connect all these classes with single threads e.g. Amazon connects e-book documents with Kindle with the Amazon catalog with recommending. Kindle is a closed system so that thread is the only you one can follow if you own the Kindle class of Enabler.  the proposed sBook would connect codex books using a custom-built Enabler with some undetermined citation format with purpose built websites and offer Discussion and Recommending services.

What is really needed, IMHO, is an open, platform-agnostic architecture that allows mix and match of all these classes. I believe Kindle is eventually going to be a limited success (not a failure, just a 10% of the market type thing) because it locks the reader into a single thread of classes. I’m more optimistic about Google Book Search because I think their physical enabler will be any device that can read a PDF and I think they will eventually ave a good citation standard and robust discussion services at GBS.