The institute of the future of the book is a US-based organisation and website that investigates, comments and acts upon the shift from the printed and bound to the digitally based. Their mission is to record this shift from the book to the networked screen, and to promote and assist the evolution of the book into its new format.
Their blog, if:blog, is a daily collection of news, thoughts, research and ideas about the transformation of reading and the tangible book. Fiercely positive about what digitising the book means, the blog is an archived plethora of material that includes (but is not limited to) discussions on the fate of independent booksellers, the morals of Wal-Mart, Amazon and Target's price setting, book-reading devices, vooks, copyright and copyleft, education and interactive media. One post I really liked was What I heard at MIT, which, although three years old, nicely encapsulates a lot of the jargon, uncertainty and mixed messages I hear flying around publishing proposal meetings.
However, it is the institute's projects that I find really interesting such as the blog-based peer review of Noah Wardrip-Fruin's manuscript published by MIT. Fruin, a professor of communication at UC San Diego, submitted his manuscript in chunks over ten weeks to Grand Text Auto, a community of bloggers made up of writers and digital artists who are interested in multimedia, games and all things digital. They reviewed and gave feedback on his work - exactly the same as the traditional process of providing academic manuscripts for academic peer-review prior to being published. Except, this was an open-peer review using a community of bloggers. The institute helped by adapting the CommentsPress functionality to accommodate the reviewers' task.
Fruin's book, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies was published in September 2009.
Oddly, I can't find an ebook version...
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