Bob Stein, visiting fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication, gave a talk at Duke last week about how new media technologies are disrupting traditional practices of information production and consumption. This was right up my alley so I had to attend. (Thanks Ryan for the notice.)

Bob has been thinking about many of the same issues I’ve been pondering, but five times longer. Bob became interested in multimedia books in the early 1980s after seeing a demo of video integrated with text at MIT. He’s gone on to a notable academic and professional career developing software to make it easy for average authors to create books rich in the full complement of media that pervade our lives.

Here are my notes from the talk:

• Bob led the development of TK3, which allows authors to assemble text, pictures, audio and video into a book.
• Title of the talk was “Point of View Really Is Worth Eighty IQ Points” (based on a famous Alan Kay quote)
• In 1981, Bob became interested (his first Aha moment) in giving authors the ability to combine media after seeing a multimedia demo at MIT on removing an oil pump
• Some things you have to see for it to make sense. He gave an example of his stepson wanting to learn about planes. It is hard to understand how planes work by just reading it — you really need to see it.
• He wanted to make a multimedia book
• He spent a lot of time thinking about what a book is what it means to go electronic
• “A book is a phenomenal random access device” (unlike TV and movies)
• He showed a couple of the early CD-based books he worked on in the early 1990s
• He wanted to make tools for the average author to develop multimedia content that did not require a programmer
• A high school teacher used his software extensively and found students got more interested in projects because they could use the full complement of media
• He had another Aha experience 12 years ago when he realized it is all about the network - people need to be able to find information
• “Books are fuel for social engagement”
• No reason that books couldn’t directly facilitate the social engagement
• He wondered if the Communist Manifesto was written today how it might work. Post it to a website and have people comment on it.
• There could be hundreds of thousands of comments over time. How would you handle that?
• futureofthebook.org
• Without Gods (blog about a book in progress)
• Publishers didn’t want the author providing text of the book online because they thought it would cannibalize sales. Now they like it because he has attracted a lot of attention.
• After looking at Mac widgets, Bob had another Aha moment - you don’t have to use just 1 window for a book.
• Video needs to be in a separate box from text so it doesn’t cannibalize attention
• His new software is called Sophie
• Bob created a simple example book in about 5 minutes
• He went into the tools business because Adobe/Macromedia only catered to high end professionals
• (When asked about collaboration) He thinks the independent artist is a recent phenomenon. There is no known (single) architect of a gothic cathedral. There were multiple architects that worked on any one cathedral.
• He doesn’t know if we could create music as good as Bach, but maybe there are different forms of music we haven’t even thought of because we haven’t worked together.