The Promise Of Digital Is More Than Text Transfer

Yet another great presentation from the BookNet Canada Tech Forum has been posted online.

This time, Dominique Raccah, the Publisher of Sourcebooks, Inc. a company she founded in 1987. I love how it's defined so beautifully on their website as Sourcebooks: Community, Books and Solutions. Do you see how books are nicely embedded between community and solutions?

Dominique did a presentation on the topic area Breaking Ground: Transforming Innovative Ideas to Action.

I love some of the concepts she outlined in her presentation such as the "book unleashed" -- I love that idea. She talked about the promise of digital being more than text transfer, that ebooks are just part of the story.

She outlined the 2002 mixed media project We Interrupt This Broadcast that was a combination book and CD set so you could not only read about the events that shaped the world, but also listen to the original recording and the incredible success it saw. This was back in 2002. Imagine the mixed media projects that could be during using today's technology, using tomorrow's technology.

During this overview of the mixed media book success she mentioned something I thought was critical called the CONTENT CONTINUUM and how books create theatre of the mind. On that point, she stated that "you don't want to interrupt the theatre of the mind, that engagement." (Of course, given that she's from the US, she probably actually said "theater of the mind" but I inscribed it the British/Canadian way . . . my bad)

But again, Dominique didn't just talk about publishing in the traditional sense, she asked the question about communities, she pushed the idea of creating new ways of delivering content, she talked about the importance of integration of the content into a liquid/seamless media experience.

I, of course, also had the distinct pleasure of having met Dominique the evening before at a dinner with the presenters, so she had already impressed the hell out of me and held me in rapt attention. Thus, it was a huge benefit to be able to not only learn from her the evening before the event, but to get to watch her presentation.

And yes, despite a full page of notes, I'm delighted to be able to watch this again online.