Open Book Publishers

Nik Sultana <ns441@cam.ac.uk>

"J.R.J. Gatti" <rupert.gatti@openbookpublishers.com>

Proposal: The technical textbook of the future

Original discussion:

We're still working out the details of the project, but this is an idea of what we have so far. Despite the original constraints on books (imprimaturs, etc), they have served as a force of liberation for people and the information which empowers them. Books have evolved over the last years as they migrated to e-reader platforms (Kindle, tablets, etc) but they are still somewhat attached to the old paradigm (in which a publisher fixes a book's appearance).

We are thinking of proposing to build a platform where books can be taken apart, annotated, (and having annotations on annotations), and hyperlinked (to other books, annotations, sentences within books, videos on youtube, etc).

Despite serving as a liberating force, it's somewhat ironic that books themselves are being bound behind DRMs and suchlike. We want our proposed project to fit the open-access paradigm quite well (e.g. if a book is distributed under a Creative Commons CC-BY license), to facilitate making mash-ups and extensions/modifications of books.

Wikis, CMSs, and blog systems are too coarse or unstructured to implement this, but could serve as a basic technology on which to build. The target user of this technology is anybody who uses books (students, lecturers, but even casual readers). Ideally the resulting code from this project would be distributed as open source.

There are still some ideas to pin down, in order to ensure that the project is defined-enough to make it feasible. There is something for everybody in such a project (e.g., theoretically-inclined students can play with graph algorithms, systems-include people can tune the engines, and graphically-inclined people can sharpen the UX).

feedback

Perhaps it would be worth trying to start from the other end. Amazon's Kindle was an explicit attempt to create a more book-like experience as a counter to generic digital web platform. It doesn't seem like you're trying to be *more* book-like than the Kindle - so for people who like books, what will they gain from the trade-off of adding more complexity to the Kindle? Is the ability to add annotations a compelling proposition for Kindle customers? Who do you see being the market for that capability?