An interesting conference is being organized at UCI by Barbara Cohen and Stephen Franklin. The title is ‘The Book is History’. Indeed we are at an interesting point in the history.
I am also participating in this conference. The following is the abstract of my panel presentation.
Books have played a very significant role in advancement of civilization for a long time. The current form of book has been evolving for more than 2000 years. Wikipedia says “A book is a collection of paper, parchment or other material with text, pictures, or both written on them, bound together along one edge, usually within covers.� Advances in technology are resulting in disruptive changes to the form of book those we all have so dearly loved, admired, and worshipped. From a physical, well defined, solid form, it seems to be evolving into an organic, live, and amorphous form in which depending on the context and person it may adopt different forms. This change is already here and we have already started using it. This new form of book offers exciting possibilities – interactivity, multimodal, and evolving books that will cover a topic of interest in richer and more complete way. We are definitely at an inflexion point in our efforts to grasp knowledge. Technology encouraged us to objectification of knowledge in the past; now it is pointing us to eventification of knowledge. And this is exciting.