(2009-03-15) Wikert Personalized Howto Ebook Platform

Joe Wikert imagines his ideal HowTo EBook Platform. It knows my history. I'm a long-time Windows user, a former programmer, an advanced Excel user, etc. How does it know this about me? By monitoring my reading and Note Taking habits... It's alive. The book isn't "finished" when the author submits a manuscript. Content can be added and modified at any time... You can't accomplish this in a printed book. It's would also be extremely challenging for one author to write something like this. I think it requires a collaborative effort led by a community manager - think Wikipedia on steroids. And because the device you'll read this on allows you to embed your own notes (Annotation), the more you read the more the book learns about you. What I'm describing isn't really a book at all. It's more of a platform, one that requires a completely new perspective. The authoring model has to change to allow for more chunkified content (Node Web) where each piece can stand on its own or be stitched together as required by that reader. Every piece would have to be rigorously tagged to enable this dynamic presentation.