(2010-09-13) Mcguire Book Internet Merge

Hugh McGuire predicts that the line between the Internet and the EBook will disappear within 5 years. While the value of the digitization of books for readers has primarily been, to date, about access and convenience, there is massive and untapped (and unknown) value to be discovered once books are connected. Once books are accessible in the way well-structured websites are... EPub is really a way to build a website without letting readers or publishers know it. But everything exists within the EPUB spec already to make the next obvious -- but frightening -- step: let books live properly within the Internet, along with websites, databases, blogs, Twitter, map systems, and applications... We are a long, long way from publishers thinking of themselves as API providers -- as the Application Programming Interface (API) for the books they publish. But we've seen countless times that value grows when data is opened up (sometimes selectively) to the world. That's really what the Internet is for; and that is where book publishing is going. Eventually.

By coincidence, just ran across this post from June by Blaine Cook. If there's going to be one best and only platform for consuming books, it's going to be the web. The reality is more complicated, of course, and we'll probably have as many platforms for reading books as we do types of paper. Those platforms will also have learned from the internet, unlike Seth Godin's suggestions (which are good nonetheless).

Update: see Book Server.