It has been almost 600 years since Gutenberg invented the printing press, so next generation books are long over due. I have written several times about the inevitable revolution in book publishing. The introduction of Apple’s iPad is a major advancement  in the transformation of the idea of a book as printed words to a full multi-media experience. There is now an iPad application for three interactive children’s stories.

TheNextWeb has a great post about the interactive experience of games and animations within books.

This is nothing short of a revolution in children’s books. The adult can read while the child plays with the screen’s attractions, making reading not only a fun, but also an interactive experience.

This is just the beginning of what I have been calling unbooks. The real advancements will come when readers connect and form communities around the ideas in the books. Perhaps they will be ’social books.’ There are problems with using the word ‘book’ because these interactive experiences will be part book, part video, part discussion, part website, part curation, etc. I don’t know if the old idea of a ‘book’ encapsulates the new concepts accurately. One thing is certain; there are some exciting opportunities for authors and forward-thinking publishers.

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Vook – Interactive books

TheUnbook A print based concept of the future of books as regularly updated and improved publications.

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The Future of Books
Unbooks: Leo Babauta of ZenHabits is an Early Pioneer of the New Model of Book Publishing

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Book publishing is an archaic industry long over due for a revolution. In this Internet age, when information is instantly available from anywhere on the planet, it doesn’t make sense to go through a long publishing cycle only to have a product that is already dated. Books should be a work-in-progress of constantly enhanced and updated material. Books need to be a community, not a static product. While there are many experiments with the new model of publishing, Leo Babauta of ZenHabits, latest book Focus is most likely going to be one of the early large scale successes.

What is an Unbook?

Dave Gray and Jay Cross believe that unbooks are a ‘living book’ that ‘accelerates the path from idea to object’ and the ‘evolution of the living’ object. Watch the full ShareShare presentation below.

Focus, the Unbook

Babauta’s current book, Focus is a perfect example of Gray and Cross’s idea. Here is how Babauta describes his book model:

Write just the core content, in short chapters.

Publish this on the web in “beta” form. Share it with a small group of readers, for free.

Ask them to comment and even make contributions. I’ll decide what goes in, of course.

I’ll revise and expand on the book, based on input from early readers. Will publish new versions as they’re done.

More readers will be invited, and more feedback welcomed. More revisions will come out.

Finally, the book will be done, freely available on the web to read. Credits included for contributions from readers.

Will turn into an ebook, also freely downloadable, encourage people to spread it widely.

Will get a publisher to publish and distribute the print version, or failing that, self publish. Will sell this for a fee.

There might be some additional info in the different versions, to encourage people to check out all versions if they like.

When a Book Stops Being a Book

In a previous post, I wrote about what I think the future of books should be.  Babauta’s Future is one of those books, but there still is another dimension in the evolution of books and that is multimedia content. With the rapid adoption of Apple’s iPad, it shouldn’t be long before our concept of books as a container of text morphs into an experience complete with audio, video, animations, discussion forums, on and offline events and meet ups. Some books should be a service, not a product. Connecting people to people is the real value of ideas.  Reading is great but there are so many more possibilities on the horizon.

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If you want to market a new book, or anything for that matter,  traditional advertising is dead. Paying big money to interrupt people when they are not paying attention is just stupid.

Seth Godin, the same marketing genius that gave away a book for free, packaged a book in a cereal box and consistently reinvents marketing forever is at it again. You just can’t keep a great mind down. There is no doubt that his new book, Linchpin: Are you Indispensable is going to be a runaway best seller.

Now, I don’t have a book to publish yet, but if I did I would definitely follow Sir Seth Godin’s tactics.

Step 1 Write a brilliant book and choose a brilliant cover.

The book has to be about one main idea that people can immediately understand and know that it will change their lives forever. The cover of a book is everything, and Sir Godin went through 150 versions to decide on the right one. Great design is simple if you work your ass off.

Step 2 Build a lot of early attention.

Sir Godin coordinated a free online ebook, What Matters Now,  of some of the best minds in business. What better way to get people thinking about your upcoming book launch?

Step 3 Connect with every major blogger you can think of

Everyone is writing about Sir Seth Godin this week. Why? Because Seth Godin is smart enough organize it this way. I can’t keep up with all of the guest posts and interviews he has done this week.

Step 4 Ride on the Momentum of Others

If you don’t think Seth Godin is smart enough, he also managed to be the first major author to announce his release on the expected Apple tablet. The tablet has been speculated on for months, what better horse to hook your wagon to?

Step 5 Offer bonuses and free content.

If the book was not enough in itself, Sir Seth Godin has managed to sweeten the deal.

Of course, we never expected anything less of Sir Seth. It just goes to show that even those at the top of their field are not afraid of hard work. In fact, it is that relentless work ethic and talent that made him the marketing guru of our age.

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With the success of Amazon’s Kindle and the hype around upcoming versions of tablet PCs, it is not too difficult to predict that our notion of what constitutes a “book” is about to drastically change.

Consider music for a moment. Songs used to be etched onto vinyl. They were plastic circles that required big stable machines to play them. Then we had reel to reel, 8-track tapes, cassettes, compact discs, Minidisk, MP3, iPod and iTunes. Music has been completely transformed in the last three decades. Books are just getting started.

FastCompany magazine offers an interesting forecast in, Forget E-Books: The Future of the Book Is Far More Interesting.

Instead of stagnant words on a page we will layer video throughout the text, add photos, hyperlink material, engage social networks of readers who will add their own videos, photos, and wikified information so that these multimedia books become living, breathing, works of art. They will exist on the Web and be ported over to any and all mobile devices that can handle multimedia, laptops, netbooks, and beyond.

I am actually quite surprised at how little experimentation has been undertaken with books. Even with online ebooks, the format is essentially the same except with the occasional video or link thrown in.

I think we are still a little bit stuck in the paradigm of blogging. We think content should be updated regularly in short chunks. That works for news and diary style posts like, what happened yesterday or where I went on my vacation, however it is not particularly suited for other content.

I don’t want to read 50 posts about how to use twitter for business. Some of those posts will be dated and no longer relevant. Many of the articles will cover the same material. Some of them will be completely useless.

I would like to see a single website or ‘Unbook’ that is a comprehensive collection of ideas and best practices that begins with easier topics first and progresses to more advanced issues that will take time to master. I would like this unbook to be constantly updated. It would be great to have comments on the different sections for users to add ideas or disagree. I would like notices of when new tools or applications come online to help with my desire to master Twitter. I would like to be updated about which Twitter related services have stopped. It would be even better if there were a wiki so that users can add content themselves. An unbook should be a community, not just a product.

I don’t want to subscribe to Twitter focused blogs and spend all my time studying how to use the tools. I just want to learn once then have only changes updated. The ‘unbook’ should have video, text, links to other sites and a directory of relevant blogs. It should screen content from other sites and tell me what is important.

Most of all an ‘unbook’ should be dynamic. It shouldn’t be written once and never updated. It should be an active online repository that is constantly being revised in a way that I don’t have to keep rehashing the same simple topics over and over. I just want to learn new things.

I feel this is the future of the book or blogs for that matter. We need hybrid blog-books for non-fiction content. It is a mess online to find reliable information. We need knowledge curators more than we need authors. Most business books are not particularly original anyway. Instead of saying the same thing in a slightly different way, how about organizing all the important ideas around a topic and keeping it current?

Update
Maybe the unbook is here and it is called a Vook. Seth Godin wants to be the first author to use the new platform.

There is an entire website devoted to the unbook. I should have known!

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