Can we design the future of the book? Can we leverage design thinking and strategic foresight toward an opportunistic convergence of physical and digital book forms? How might we enhance experience and interconnections between the print book and the immaterial network? Can we increase pleasure, utility, sustainability, and evolvability by bringing those two forms of publication into resonance?

This session, "Envisioning the sBook," led by researchers from Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) at Ontario College of Art & Design, seeks to make sense of the opportunities and challenges facing readers, writers and publishers, by proposing ideas and solutions that respond to emerging signals. The sBook integrates specific emerging behaviors, technologies, and business models from the realm of online publishing, social media, recommender systems, smart tagging, and print on demand. Our vision is an open information architecture and set of standards, a platform for readers, writers and publishers. The resulting experience offers the following characteristics: 

• simple: the pleasure of physical, human readable pages
• searchable: the power and practicality of electronic text
• smart: the intelligence of recommendations within and without the work
• social: updatable and evolvable through social media tools
• sustainable: material and energy management throughout the lifecycle
• scalable: an open platform supporting numerous products, services and experiences

The goal of the sBook project is to develop and evaluate prototype platforms and solutions that are readable, searchable, networkable, smart, and promote “active reading.” One prototype we seek to develop would use smart tags (2D bar codes, RFID tags) interpreted by a handheld mobile device and application, to link a printed book to a secure website with an enhanced version of the book and other authored and social content in fully digital forms.

One scenario of the sBook, which we will call sBook 1.0, is to use the bar code of the book and a bar code reader on your notebook or smart phone to link to a secure, personalized website displaying your digital version of a book. The website also hosts a social network of readers, where the author can update the book on a continuous basis. A personalized recommender engine will capture your research paths and information desires, linking to relevant places in the book as well as across the Web to enlarge the universe of relevance related to the book's content. The next step is to imagine a library of sBooks or SmartBooks in which RFID tags have been embedded. The user enters the library and immediately is led to the books and the places in the books where the needed and desired information is located.

This scenario open up the possibility for authors as well as readers. A central concern in the emerging world of eBooks and online content production is that of engaging authorship in the online and mobile context. We invite participants to help us understand the compelling relationship of authorship to interactive print + online publishing forms. As AUTHORS, what relationships do you see as necessary to explore from the reader’s perspective, in non-fiction, textbooks, narrative fiction, poetics? What are the new forms of narrative and storytelling that could now come to life?” 

We'll present our research findings and prototype plans to date. One partial prototype has already been developed in which a soon to be released book will be updated on a website, serving as a platform for a social network of readers. We are eager to gather feedback and we invite open discussion and critique of these ideas from the gathered readers, writers and publishers of BookCampToronto. The project is led by Principle Investigators: Robert K. Logan, Chief Scientist at sLab and Greg Van Alstyne, sLab’s Director of Research, and includes an international team of collaborators, including Peter Jones (Redesign Research and OCAD), Ramon Sanguesa (Citilab - Barcelona), Carlos Scolari (uVic Catalonia), and Dave Gray (Xplane). With the exception of Dave Gray all the researchers will be in attendance at this session.