Craig Mod has probably had more sensible ideas about the future of the book than any single person (and done more sensible, actual things). And somewhere, recently, I think he wrote something about how the dominance of Amazon/Kindle had killed most of the interesting things we all imagined would happen when books had computers in them.
I remember being vey excited about how you'd add things to text: music, moving images, game-like stuff, all that. There are probably blog posts in here excitedly proclaiming all that inevitable. Well, obviously, that didn't happen.
What's just occurred to me, though. is that some of what we meant, some of those possibilities, are starting to show up on the web.
This, for instance, is way more useful and engaging than any textbook you could read about sound. (h/t Matt)
Of there's watches, or GPS. Magical.
There's the lovely stuff Ableton made. (Or is that now something else? Is that not sufficiently bookish?)
I'm trying to write a book at the moment and I'd kill to be able to use Nutshells.
Or there are Maggie Appleton's essays.
These are all great things on my computer and phone. But they're somehow different in a browsing moment than they might be as part of a longer, book-like reading experience. Dunno.
Anyway.