After last Thursday morning’s post about the possible bookstore of tomorrow, a reader alerted us to recent posts at if:book, the blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book, about where book technology may be headed. As library technologist Tim McCormick comments, the real charm of the hypothetical technology presented in the video is that “it augments our lives and intelligence, rather than displacing it or delivering something purportedly all new.”
The nine-and-then-some-minute film is in unsubtitled French, but it’s fairly easy to get the gist: Our happy couple are using their devices, which combine the compactness of Sony Readers with the touchscreen capabilities of an iPhone, to buy and read books, including full-color tourist resources that offer multimedia capabilities, and wireless communication (including file sharing) between devices, among other features. But this is not meant as a definitive statement about e-book technology; as the explanation on the video’s YouTube page says, after the Babelfish translation’s been tweaked, the film provides “a debate on the various possible economic models and the future functionalities of the reading devices currently in development.”