The Refinement Club

Mass-Refinement 04: Ebooks

Last Wednesday we arranged our fourth Mass-Refinement, hosted by Katachi Magazine, about the future of books and refining the ebook. The whole event was a blast and all the guests shared tons of interesting thoughts and ideas and together we all came up with some interesting insights, ideas and concepts. We are currently working on structuring and elaborating it all into a presentation worthy of all the stellar thoughts conceived during the Mass-Refinement.

Meanwhile you can read the opening speech based on the Brief for Mass-Refinement - 04 Ebooks.

Somethings to think about:

1. Connecting readers to authors

Last week Amazon launched the interesting Kindle feature @Author which lets you ask authors questions directly from your Kindle. A pretty neat feature. Browsing the questions we stumbled upon this question:

Question @Steven Johnson:

“Steven, you’ve often written about the ways in which a city’s density enables great ideas to flourish. You’ve applied the same metaphor to the web as a engine of creativity and innovation. What about book-reading? Do see our natural inclinations towards socialization spreading to e-books as innovative tech enables us to engage texts more collaboratively?”

2. Reading the question above confirmed something we have been thinking about for a while; how can we connect thoughts and ideas related to individual books and its passages? Make notes in books public and let people share their ideas and thoughts related to their readings.

3. Contextual connections; connecting books and passages with other books and passages (hyperlinks for books?)

4. Rethink notetaking in ebooks.

5. When reading paper based books your constantly getting tangible feedback everytime you turn to the next page, as you feel the one side of the book gets thinner and thinner while the other side gets thicker and thicker. Digital books lacks this feature.

6. The bookshelf. Books are trophies and badges showing off how well read you are.

7. Bookstores provide expertise, social interaction and lucky discoveries. The same thing goes for libraries.

8. Typography in ebooks sucks.

9. There is a confusing amount of different ebook platforms and solutions that are available.

10. Primetime vs. whitespace time - we are constantly consuming content, but are using different devices at different times.

11. Money - how will the authors earn money in the world of tomorrow?

12. Tomorrows books and ereaders will be free, ad supported, connected both contextually and socially, and independently published.

13. A book is worth more than a thousand words. 

This kicked of the event and hopefully it sparked of some interesting ideas. Stay tuned to read more about the future of the book.

Head over to our Facebook page to take part in the conversation and look at pictures from the event. Also you can follow us on Twitter to stay up to date.