Sophie The future of reading Michael Rüger†, Bob Stein‡, Dan Visel‡ Impara GmbH†, Institute for the Future of the Book‡ [email protected], [email protected] , [email protected] Abstract creating with Sophie. Here, then, is a selective history of attempts at making electronic books. Sophie is an all purpose tool for dealing with Sophie’s theoretical heritage can be found in the media. It will allow users to easily create books that prescient software of Voyager, a company that started can contain any sort of media on hand – text, images, thinking about what could be done with reading in the sounds, videos, animations. Sophie does for media screen-based, multimedia-enhanced environment that what a physical book does for text and images: with increasingly powerful personal computers afforded in Sophie, authors can create multimedia books. You the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1991, they presented might think of it as a wrapper for anything digital. the first real effort at creating an electronic reading With Sophie we are tackling long standing issues as environment, the Expanded Books series. Each book keeping documents and their media accessible for a was released on its own floppy disk; each was long time (the 200 year problem) and making essentially a stand-alone application. The Expanded electronic books living documents that capture and Books presented the content of books in readable reflect the readers' interactions and comments (the pages, which could be bookmarked and annotated, annotation problem). analogously to a real book. The Expanded Books were followed by the Expanded Book Toolkit, which 1. Background allowed users to create their own books in the same format. There’s no shortage of formats of various things out While Voyager was essentially a publishing house, there that could be construed as electronic books. Titles publishing books produced by a team of editors and of existing books have been around almost as long as programmers, it wanted to create tools that would the personal computer. A text, however, is not a book: allow the average user to create Voyager-like books a text is only part of a book. A book presents a reading without any special technical knowledge. The environment which is something we’re interested in Expanded Books Toolkit had been the first step in this direction; TK3, a product eventually released by Night Kitchen in 2001, was a further iteration of the same design. The rise of the Internet around 1995 brought about the end of Voyager, in part because readers became accustomed to free multimedia content that didn’t use dedicated software outside of a web browser. Another major factor was the very limited bandwidth available, making it all but impossible to deliver the media rich content to the prospective readers. Sophie's either sixteen years in the making or nearly three depending on whether you go back to the beginning or not. The Mellon Foundation approached some of the TK3 team and asked them to build a new multimedia authoring program which would extend Figure 1: Voyager’s First Person: TK3 by enabling time-based events and make it able to Stephen Jay Gould on Evolution live on the network. That became Sophie. 2. Existing models photographs (something like a slideshow), adding narration or a soundtrack to play with the rhythm. Or Two basic models of electronic books have been you could make a video-based book, or a book based presented in the years since Voyager. While both work around a single photograph, annotated with audio to for certain uses, both have significant inherent tell a story. Or you could mix any of these (and more) drawbacks that inscribe themselves indelibly on work forms together to create something entirely new. based on these formats. Here’s a more concrete example. Let’s make a book One is the PDF-based model. PDFs, it turned out, that’s based around a movie. Imagine that you’re a worked for presenting material that needed to look drama teacher; your class has just rehearsed a play, exactly the same every time in a screen-based environ- which you’ve videotaped. When the film clip’s in ments. For graphics and text it’s a fine solution: it’s Sophie, you can do a number of things with it. With the entirely possible to take the text of a book, format it, text of a script of the play, you could present subtitles and present it as a book. But PDFs are problematic if with what’s written in the script while the actors are you want an electronic book to do more. They’re not saying it. Or you could record a commentary track very interactive. While it’s possible to put forms, about what’s going on in the play; the readers of the buttons, and links into PDFs, as well as audio and book could switch back and forth between the recorded video, there’s no dedicated content creation system to sound and your soundtrack. let any but advanced users create such PDFs. Creating a PDF is very similar to printing a document: the 3.1. Time printout is static compared to the living document, a snapshot of one instance in a document’s life. Back to history: some of the most ground-breaking The second model of electronic books existing products released by Voyager in the early 1990s were today is based on a markup language like HTML or the CD-ROMs based around pieces of classical music XML – in effect, a specialized use of the technology (figure 2). To use one as an example, Beethoven’s underlying most of the web. A plain text editor will let Ninth Symphony would play; as it played, text and you write a book-length novel in HTML; Flash will let graphics would explain to the reader what was going you make interactive multimedia presentations; on with the music. The music could be paused so the something like Flickr will let you make a slideshow of reader could absorb the text; when the reader went to your photos. But it’s difficult to mix forms with these the next page of text, the music would keep up. technologies. If you want to present a Flickr slideshow Since then, however, such interactive books have of illustrations as a reader views your novel which been almost entirely absent. This absence has much to you’ve posted on your website, you’re out of luck do with the lack of tools to make them. While it could unless you are fluid in coding in e.g. Javascript. If you be hard-coded – like Voyager did it – or done in want to make an interactive presentation of comments something like Flash, it’s still an enormous amount of in your blog using Flash, you’re also out of luck, work; certainly it’s not the sort of thing a professor of unless you want to hire a programmer to do it for you. music could produce without help. With Sophie, The Web is a tremendous repository for content. It’s anyone (with some practice) should be able to make a not yet a space where form can be easily played with if book as sophisticated as Voyager’s Beethoven. you’re not a programmer. 3. New structures for books It’s a mistake to think that a book is just a container for text. A well-designed book presents text in a useful way. Similarly, Sophie’s more than just a wrapper for media: it will allow users to structure information intelligently. Sophie differs from previous platforms for electronic reading by giving the author as much control over the form of what they’re making as the content. Sophie is media-agnostic: all media is the same inside of Sophie. You could make a book based around Figure 2: a long piece of text (like a traditional novel). Or you Robert Winter's close reading of Beethoven could make a book based around a series of 3.2. The page and the canvas But there are more ways in which Sophie integrates with the web, Sophie Server allows for easy up and A physical book has pages: we take it for granted download of books directly to and from a network that pages follow pages in a sequential order, like location. The OKI extension opens up access to all spoken words follow each other. You can make books OKI enabled repositories, making a vast amount of like this with Sophie – it’s the default setting. But as artwork and media available to Sophie book authors. has been hinted above, a Sophie book can have a more In the area of social networking the comments fluid relationship with pages. Let’s look at another sort extension adds the ability to add live comment fields to of reading: how you might use the desktop of your a book (page). Users can comment on the book from computer. There might be a movie player in the upper within the book. Comment fields are updated live left with a video you want to see, there’s a music while the user is reading the book and are also player in the bottom right, there’s a text editor open available as regular RSS feeds outside of Sophie with something you’re reading. You might be doing Where does Sophie end? It should be clear that more than one of them at once, bouncing from one to Sophie is not just an environment for creating and another. Most importantly, however: these are three reading books in – it’s an environment for creating and independent objects.