When Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen predicted at the end of Tuesday’s Tools of Change session that print would be dead within 5-10 years, it struck me as such typical techie bravado that I barely bothered to write it down, forget report it. But his prediction received a sharp rebuttal during Wednesday morning’s keynotes in the form of a presentation by Royal College of Art designer Manolis Kelaidis (left), whose “bLink” demo got the first standing ovation I’ve ever seen at a professional conference. Here’s the elevator pitch: You print a book using conductive ink that turns words and images into hyperlinks, so that when you touch them, it activates a processor embedded in the cover, and that sends a wireless signal to a nearby computing device—enabling you to obtain background information, learn how a foreign word is pronounced, see a picture of a described work of art, hear a song mentioned in the text… (As soon as the O’Reilly people post the video, I’ll be mentioning it here, believe me.)
As Tim O’Reilly says in his blog observations, Kelaidis’ presentation points to “a future in which the physical world will be infused with computing,” a world where we don’t have to choose between books and computers because computers have become embedded in our books. The most amazing thing, the aspect that fascinated people during the Q&A, is that the basic underlying technology is already available; it’s just a matter of bringing the cost down. Granted, it’s unlikely that every book will be printed this way in the near future, but one can easily envision “special editions” of certain books. (One of the examples Kelaidis used in his demo was The Da Vinci Code, and, you know, if it were feasible right now, I think people might very well shell out another $40 or $50 for a deluxe edition that could “pop up” pictures of the Mona Lisa and charts of the Merovingian bloodline on their laptop or mobile phone.)