People ask me all the time if books will ever become obsolete. I don’t think so. There is something unique and personal about a book that it’s digitization can never duplicate. Our culture still values whats original and unique. And books are some of the most unique creations of civilization. They are little mind bombs set to go off in your head when you least expect it.

I found this nice quote on the Booklad blog, where Dan Poynter discusses some interesting statistics on book reading. Check it out.

Jeff Jarvis also links to the Booklad post and provides some additional book stats (like 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year).

Tim O’Reilly blogged last week about the relaunch of Rice University Press in an on-line centric model. It looks like all of the content will be available for free on-line and readers can pay to order a print copy (which will be printed on demand). According to the original article, authors will be able to amend and annotate their books as well as chat with readers.

Ultimately, cutting edge publishers are giving away more content because it sells more books right? It allows people to preview works they might be interested in purchasing, obviously… My question is, how can the on-line content increase the value of the print copy after they are purchased?

The Exbiblio vision which is about adding value to both printed and on-line content by streamlining the connection between the two. Imagine being able to read a printed work without sacrificing the interactive nature of the on-line edition (the discussion, multimedia content, etc…). Imagine the book as an interface to the rich content.

So, news of rich digital content based on paper documents is exciting for us and we wish Rice University great success!