Bob Stein

8:30 to 9:00 a.m.
Platinum I

Modern-day print culture portrays reading and writing as among the most solitary of behaviors. Discussion, if it occurs, takes place outside the pages — around the water cooler, at the dinner table or in other publications in the form of reviews or references and bibliographies. However, as reading and writing move from paper to mobile networked screens, documents become places where people can engage in active discussion with others. And once people have engaged in a social reading experience the value of reading with people you trust becomes clear.  More eyes on a problem or  more minds collaborating potentially yields significantly better understanding of complex problems. This talk will include the first public demonstration of SocialBook, of a new social reading platform to be released in January.

The Speaker

Bob Stein is founder and co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book and founder of The Voyager Company. For 13 years he led the development of over 300 titles in ‘The Criterion Collection’, a series of definitive films on videodisc, and more than 75 CD ROM titles including the CD Companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, ‘Who Built America’, and the Voyager edition of ‘Macbeth’. Previous to Voyager, Stein worked with Alan Kay in the Research Group at Atari on a variety of electronic publishing projects. Eleven years ago, Stein started ‘Night Kitchen’ to develop authoring tools for the next generation of electronic publishing. That work is now being continued at the Institute for the Future of the Book.