Reinventing the book

This too is for academics, general readers too. Books, as we know them, is changing completely! Possibilities are immense. This article looks at some of them as is happening and as is evident from the BookExpo end May!
For one thing, the possibilities of combining multi-media has not really been applied completely. I feel very excited in thinking about just how it can be used for making the learning of concepts so easy. Education is, after all, about getting these concepts! Rest of your life, one applies them and possibly makes this place a little more livable! As people get more used to reading from screens, the book is bound to shift to the screen. There are no two ways about it. I would think, that would happen by the time the young generation, early and late twenties, take over. These people are so used to reading screens that reading learning material from screens would be very natural for them. What form the content will take is anybody's guess. This article discusses a few, things that are visible already. Time to think how best to use the new technologies and how to use them for learning!


Reinventing the book, one uncertain step at a time

Content, SEO and Crap

Search engines decide what is an important web site by several methods. If a site had good content there will be a good use of keywords the topic it is dealing with. So keyword desity is an item on this chart. Lot of people will obviously refer to the content if it is good. There is that back-link concept.

As long as things worked on these assumptions, this was working reasonably. However along came the e-commerce revolution. People needed traffic to their sites. If you have a large enough number coming to your site, a certain percentage of them would become buyers of your products. Now, if visitors cannot find you in the millions of search results, you remain the store on the main street of some obscure town-the internet equivalent. You have to get on to the first page if not the number one position!

Along came the SEO experts and discovered the above among other things. I am sure they work. But one direct consequence is that a lot of content on the net is simply useless. They are aimed at generating these keyword densities and the backlinks. The actual content could actually be meaningless. It' gotten so bad, you'll find sites easily which has parts of a page simply repeating the keywords over and over again. Meaning of "ad nauseam" hits you straight! Generating backlings has taken over the comments on forums, blogs and networking sites. There only aim is to create a link back to the target site. What the comments say is irrelevant.

People have started realising this, I guess. There is a momentum building slowly about quality content. Just the stirrings now. Hopefully, things will work out.