Answer the question “What is a Book?” in a 60 to 90 seconds digital presentation.

Since the book entered the digital medium and in particular the World Wide Web its form has begun to change. Books created in social communities have different characteristics than classic books. The social book can have discussions inside, both live chats and asynchronous exchanges through comments. The reader is able to see who else is reading the book and even have discussions with them. Everyone can leave notes and comments for the author and/or other readers. In collaborative book projects anyone can become the author. Basically blogs are exactly that: electronic books, which are edited, commented and discussed by people who are audience and author at the same time. Social networks let the notion of author and audience change and weave into each other.

There already exist a lot of social networking book projects on the web. One of the bestknown examples is Wikipedia – a collaborative encyclopedia. “Wikipedia is a totally new kind of book in that it is never static, always growing. It has boundaries, but these boundaries are always shifting and are highly porous.” (The Social Life Of Books, Ben Vershbow) This is a general attribute of online authoring and writing: everything is dynamic, changeable at any time and from any place. With books loosing their physical dimension the terms author, reader and content change significantly.

There are a lot interesting online book projects: One is Novel Twist – where each page is written by a different author. While Wikipedia is information oriented and (hopefully in most cases) based on facts, Novel Twist is a collaborative fiction novel. The Institute for the Future of the Book developed a tool, called Sophie, which is intended to help authors easily create books that use any medium. With Sophie authors can integrate video, audio and pictures easily in one document. It is also possible to include dynamic text fields, which can be used for creating comments on the web. Changed text will be published to each copy of the book simultaneously in the net.

For my book project I want to dive deeper in the changing relationship of author and reader, and explore the possibilities of networked books.