I'm reaching the conclusion that thinking the future of the book would be a different <i>product</i> is hugely flawed. Books, or reasonably static electronic equivalents -- PDFs and ePubs -- suit the process of immersive long-form content assimilation. Spastic UI/UX does not.<p>But as with quipu, cuneiform, papyrus, the codex, moveable type, and its manifold enhancements over the past two centuries (the preceding 350 years saw virtually none to the press itself, though book-form itself advanced markedly), the biggest differences have come in the process of creating, publishing, duplicating, archiving, and propagating texts. Not, for the most part, accessing them.<p>Starting about 1880, a number of changes to text development and distribution began, with typewritten "manuscripts", loose-leaf bindings (enabling updating of already-published texts), databases, digital text storage, digital typesetting (roff and kin, early 1970s), version control systems, online and hypertext systems, wikis, and distributed version control.<p>(We might push that back slightly further as well to Carl Linnaeus and index cards.)<p>The ability of many people to collaborate, <i>or compete</i>, in developing a collective narrative, with instantaneous typeset updates is truly novel. It's also to a large degree independent of and agnostic to end-point consumption -- desktop, laptop, mobile, TTS, and hardcopy are all reasonably equivalent from the perspective of the txt.<p>(Text discovery, recommendation, and popularity are another matter, McLuhan's observations re: medium are relevant.)<p>We should pay far more attention to <i>process</i> rather than <i>product</i>.