=~ ~~ > S a) wv pa UW Qe oO W— = ra L =~ Cc a) € Oo W— — - s tol8) & fol8) a) tol8) Cc wv oO » — oO oO Oo wv — Y Cc wv oO oO — v oO oO a an) LL £ GC oO ae) Cc oO S ra) po » W— > € ° Qe ~~ - Cc _) € € oO UW — ra ca) U = € LL wv — Y & <— - s iv, W— Oo Cc ca) c 9 WY wv Oo Cc oO > UW ca) pom wv wet = oO ae) Cc 0 WY wv Oo » Cc a oO € o Qe me) Cc ca) ot) Cc ae, ca) € reading, the idea that reading is immersive. For many titles that will continue to be the preferred way of engaging. But for a lot of titles it is also going to be deeply enriching and exciting to see a book as a community, to have your reading experience enhanced by your simultaneous opinions or asynchronous comments of other people reading the same text. To see the pages that most people have commented on or that most people have read rising to the fore of your text because presumably they are the most important pieces of content. To share in real time, so that if you are reading a passage that you think is amazing, you can take that paragraph and you can tweet it right away, or you can facebook it, you can post it to your online community site, you can put it on to your blog. Conventional reading has been increasingly sidelined because people are putting their attention into the forms of content that are socially enriched, or that they are able to integrate into their own narrative by pulling it on to their blog. The idea that those reading experiences can now become part of my social stream and my fellow readers can be part of my community, really speaks in a very exciting way to the social power of reading. How many of us have had these wonderful conversations with friends where they just read the book you just read, and you really connect around it. Now that experience is easier to find because you'll be able to see the people who are reading the same book as you and maybe even discuss it as you are reading it. Then you'll also be able to take that experience of reading directly into the social networks where you are all being engaged. CM: Moving away from the technicalities and characteristics of ebooks, and thinking of them as a cultural artifact, why do we care about how we define them or about how they are received? AS: Books are one of the central artifacts of our culture, and they are important both in terms of knowledge creation and learning. The book remains the core of our model of learning; now, that model is changing, but if you can find a student that hasn’t had a book assigned throughout the course of their education I’d be very surprised. Books are also really core to our notions of democracy. If you look at the history of the printed word and the rise of the printing press, they are very tightly intertwined. It was only with the advent of print and the ability to create books, and later periodicals, that you were able to create a sense of a common discourse: people reading, sharing and discussing the same set of ideas. When you start to chip away at the edges of what we understand that artifact to be you start challenging our notions of the role of the book as a core part of our democratic discourse. If people don’t engage deeply with ideas the way that you would in a book, what will fuel our democratic conversations? CM: You've participated in a number of projects through the “Art of the Ebook” program in the SIM Centre and you’ve worked with teams of designers and content providers. What would you identify as the major challenges of working with these teams? AS: One of the challenges that we face at this moment is that we are all excited about the possibilities for transcending the traditional book but we are also really bounded in our imagination by that experience. If you look at what has been done by publishers versus what is being done by software developers, I would argue that the most exciting work in the ebook space is coming from people who do not have a background in publishing simply because they are less constrained in their imagination. One of the sponsors of our first big ebook project was BookRiff, which is a spin off of a very eminent Canadian publisher, Douglas & McIntyre, and I think it is telling that it is a spin off because you do need to create that space for an epublishing project to be something of its own that isn’t too tightly connected to the way that publishers traditionally work. In the case of BookRiff, they are creating the kind of the iTunes of books; instead of a book being something that a publisher defines and binds and hands to you, a book is something you essentially create or co- create by finding the content that is relevant and packaging it up and reading it as a single volume either online or in print.