I just started reading if:book, about the future of the book, basically exactly what I am looking to study next year. There is a post about wiki’fied, linked and open-sourced books.

Interesting, especially the future desire to publish the book in hardcopy. Assuming that the digital book remains networked and open-sourced, there will be a gradual drift between the hard and soft copies. For some reason Leaves of Grass comes to mind.

Presumably, if this method of open production becomes widespread enough, could we see an entire new generation of academics and scholars whose pastime is to track versions of network books. Scholarly papers tracking the evolution, through both the wiki’fied “history” pages and the various printed editions.

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