Future: Books aren’t just books anymore

Mar 4, 2014 | Everything Else

For five hundred years, books have been pretty much the same. They’re made up of paper pages bound together. Those pages have numbers on them. There’s usually a table of contents. For business books, there’s often an index, too. But things are changing.

I rarely buy a book like that anymore. Today, my books are a combination of audio version and Kindle version. I listen to the book, instead of reading with my eyes. I make notes on a digital voice recorder to highlight interesting or insightful passages. Later, I use those notes as a guide and add highlights and comments to my Kindles version.

Our definition of book is changing. For many of us, a “book” is a number of things, not just one.

How is the definition of “book” changing for you?

Resource

The thinking for this post started when I read “Audiobooks and the Return of Storytelling” by T. M. Luhrmann.