Head Tale

As I mentioned before, the first book I downloaded to read on my new iPhone is “Little Brother” by Cory Doctorow.  I'm quite enjoying it – both the story and the convenience of always having a book with me in a very compact form.  I also just finished “Free: The Future of A Radical Price” by Chris Anderson in the old-fashioned dead tree format. 

Reading these books, which deal with overlapping themes in some ways, made me realise what I think will finally be the think to make e-books gain widespread acceptance. 

I should step back a second. 

When I worked in publishing from 1997-2001, digitization, e-books and any and all related subjects were very hot topics of conversation (as I would imagine they still are.) 

In 2000, I was fortunate enough to attend the Association of Canadian Publishers AGM in Toronto and I remember e-books being a major theme of the gathering.  They had displays of the current cream-of-the-crop readers and I remember one presenter saying “By 2005, we expect that fully 50% of the population will be using e-book readers.”  Well, like other famous tech predictions, you know how that one turned out. 

Although e-books are gaining ground every year and especially in the last few years with the growing prevalence of much improved e-book readers and smart phones, they still haven't reached anywhere near a mass acceptance.

So reading that Chris Anderson book, the light bulb went off as to what would finally make people adopt e-books in a more widespread fashion.  Right now, it's a pretty standard function to be able to highlight and search your own e-books on a single device.  But what if there was a web site where you could easily upload, tag, comment on, search and do all those other standard things you do on YouTube, Flickr, LibraryThing and other social networking sites – except instead of videos or photos or books as stand-alone objects, this site would be all about user-submitted quotations from e-books?  

Google Books has this function to a degree but obviously, there's a huge difference between a machine doing the search and the social web, human-driven way of doing things (at least for now.) 

Imagine you're doing interested on “library science”.  You could search this site for quotes tagged “MLIS”.  Or search the quotes themselves.  Or find a user who tends to upload quotes in that subject area a lot – maybe a current MLIS student or a tech-savvy prof? 

Oh yeah, this idea (c) Jason Hammond 2009 All Rights Reserved. ™. Patent Pending. All around The Block, All Around the Universe, So Help Me, Gord.