Giant Robot Lasers

0 Notes

Tim wrote a book. The title of Tim’s book is The Twitter Book. Tim didn’t use a pen to write his book. Tim didn’t even use a word processor to write his book. Tim used PowerPoint to write his book. Tim wrote his book very fast, as fast, he says, as he writes “a new talk.” There are pictures in Tim’s book. Pictures, Tim says, “are a memorable, entertaining way to tell a story.” Tim says he is “reinventing the book in the age of the web.” Tim’s book was a lot easier to write than an old-fashioned book would have been. “All I needed to do,” Tim says, “was to write down some notes equivalent to what I’d be saying if I were giving this as a talk.” Sometimes, says Tim, old-fashioned authors “lose track of their plot details.” That didn’t happen to Tim. It’s “much easier,” he says, “to work on things in standalone units.” Tim’s book is a lot easier to read, too. “Most books still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle,” Tim says. Tim’s book uses “a modular structure.” Following “a sustained narrative” is hard. With Tim’s book, each page “can be read alone (or at most in a group of two or three).” Tim says that “modularity isn’t the only thing that publishers can learn from new media.” The web, he says, “provides countless lessons about how books need to change when they move online.” I like the web. I’m glad that books are going to be more like the web. I’m glad that Tim wrote a book.