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The Social Book

Should books be a calm refuge from the hubbub of the network or should they be part of the flow with constantly updated social activity right in the book? As ebooks become social that is an important question. Do people want to curl up with a good book to get away from it all, or will they want to constantly stay in touch with the author and other readers? I do not have the answer to that question, but it is clear the next step in electronic books is to make them truly dynamic, with more than just the ability to search full text or submit HTML forms. The next step in ebooks will be the integration of the social network, bringing community inside the ebook. As we begin to read books on devices ranging from the iPhone to Kindle, the possibility for connecting the text to its context of authors and fans, of creating a social context for the work in the same way Twitter creates a social context, grows.

A thought occurred to me reading about Why is OpenOffice "profoundly sick"? http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10129764-16.html that development on an office suite is no longer challenging (and has not been for a decade) to most coders. I believe this is why there is so little interest in coders working on it. But making OO into a platform for ebook publishing and integrating the social network into document creation, sharing and reading,

This is already happening piecemeal. I've gleaned information from histories of chats I've participated in, collected postings from forums, email, to use in a document and I see others doing it as well. We already are writing in a social environment. Wikis are another existing socially networked writing environment and have been since day one.

If you look at the emergence of source control services like Assembla or Google code, online "forges" for producing software, I don't see why that can't happen with ebooks. It might be a better approach than creating a desktop application.

Think of how one could incorporate content from Twitter flows, Flickr photostreams, every fourm thread, QnA question answered well, everything gleaned from the flow of socially networked information directly into ebooks through some curation and publishing process. Anything can become an ebook, and ebooks can be small or large, read on the iphone or Kindle.
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