Our choice
An Inconvenient Truth explained the challenges of climate change - in his new book Al Gore takes the issue to the next, harder stage and proposes the solutions.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
3mentions
3people
2012–2017years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You might be interested in the work done by Mike Matas + Bret Victor for Al Gore's "Our Choice", I was expecting that project would be the first of a wave of digital books, but I guess it never happened. (Or maybe it did?)
http://pushpoppress.com/ourchoice/
edit: Related: https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas
(Mike Matas is now at Facebook and worked on Facebook Paper and Instant Articles, probably other stuff not on his website. Bret Victor is now working on Dynamicland at HARC.)
- 1. Most of the current e-book contents & formats (Kindle, epub, etc.) have not yet fully exploited the capabilities of the digital medium. I'd say we are not more than 30-40% (or less) there, even just considering the current level of technology.
2. Habits are hard to change. What you are most accustomed to when growing up, you tend to continue unless the advantages of change is overwhelming. Current e-book formats do not yet offer huge advantages over paper books, thus many adults keep buying paper ones. (Some advantages, like physical storage space & weight, are big, but confined to specific situations, say during travel, as mentioned in the article.)
3. New generations of kids are more and more distracted by digital interactivity and communications. I suspect the average amount of long-form reading per person in the developed world has declined over time. (Does anyone have an estimate?) Long-form narratives like paper books and current e-books cannot now hold attention of most casual readers, especially the young. Even though I did not grow up with a computer and read many books as a child, I now read quite a bit less books and many more short items on the Web (articles, blogs, forum posts, etc.).
4. Over time, when the new generation of digital natives grows up and technology progresses, e-books would gradually but surely dominate the reading market for all types of books. More importantly, popular non-fictions will be developed as a new kind of e-books, which cannot even be fully presented in the traditional narrative form. Al Gore's Our Choice [1] is just an example of the first generation's interactive e-books.
- Yes, the education angle seems appropriate given what this event was all about, but can I also say that it’s extremely boring?
What’s much cooler are the books that are possible with the tools Apple provides now. They are like Al Gore’s Our Choice (whose UI was phenomenally awesome), only even better (when looking at some details), also better integrated and (at least nearly) standards based.
Oh, and their authoring tool makes it easy for nearly everyone to make books like that and easily distribute them. That’s just cool, independent of any education bullshit that’s going on.
