What happens when books can change after they are published?
An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.
What happens when you can change books? I can definitely see advantages. For example, books on programming can incrementally change. They can cover new language features, tools, and add examples to explain new features.
So if you can change books to keep pace with the changes in underlying subjects:
- Do they need version numbers for books?
- Will there be MVP versions of the book that are free and a finished version that can be paid for?
- Will there be a notification service to let you know of changes?
4 thoughts on “Can We Leverage the Difference in Ebooks?”
Still we are stuck with non e-books !
Interesting. I can imagine a kind of ebook reader that lets a small piece of software embedded in every book and provide a sandbox framework for that piece of software to run as we are reading the book. Some interesting possibilities…
Yes. Especially if you can make them a bit interactive as well.
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