I propose today that the current workflow hierarchy – container first, limiting content and context – is already outdated. To compete digitally, we must start with context and preserve its connection to content.

We need to think about containers as an option, not the starting point. Further, we must start to open up access, making it possible for readers to discover and consume our content within and across digital realms.

Without a shift in mindset, we are vulnerable to a range of current and future disruptive entrants. Containers limit how we think about our audiences. In stripping context, they also limit how audiences find our content.

Here, scale is not our friend. It may well be the enemy. As Clay Christensen first outlined in 1997, disruptive technologies don’t look or feel like what we typically value. Often enough, they are cheaper, simpler, smaller and more convenient than their traditional analogues.

The number of printed materials coming with products has been significantly reduced in past years, while every installation CD carries a huge documentation, mostly in PDF format. It requires an extremely legible screen typeface which is readable even in long lines. There is absolutely no need of narrowed, economizing design, because the length of electronic brochures is virtually unlimited. More…

Etelka is excellent also for printed technical manuals, containing Cyrillics and useful ideograms and signs. Its design idea is wide, open rounded square outline taken from old glass monitor shape. It has cool industrial feeling with all diagonals slightly softened. It is suitable not only for product manuals, boxes or electronic books, but also for all kinds of visual communication, especially corporate identity and orientation systems in architecture.

[...] it's just as likely that as the ranks of the early adopters get saturated, adoption of ebooks will slow. Unlike the move from CDs to MP3s, there is no easy way to convert our existing stock of books to e-readers. And unlike the move from records and tapes to CDs, it's not immediately clear that an ebook is in all respects better than what it succeeds.
So the world is left with an unconvertible stock of used books that is vast. If the bustling, recession-inspired trade in used books tells us anything, it's that old books hold value for readers in a way that not even movies and music do. That's value that no ebook reader can unlock. In fact, it remains to be seen whether legions of readers raised on 99c titles at their local used bookstore (or $4.00-$5.00 titles delivered via Amazon.com) will be so eager to start buying brand new books at $10. And then there's libraries--who gets left behind when owning an ebook reader, and not merely literacy, is a requirement to borrow a book.

I’m not just here to create something beautiful. Sometimes I’m here to be a plumber. I love that aspect—I can fix things. I’ll make it balance, whatever it is. It doesn’t have to be a Maserati every time. It just has to get you to the beach. So what if there’s no roof? We’ll call it a convertible! You make it work out. That’s what I like the most.

About half the time I read the paperback. The rest of the time was in Stanza on my iPhone. They released an update (to Stanza) recently that makes jumping back and forth between the footnotes and the main text much faster. Not zippy though. It takes about 5 seconds to go to a footnote and about 1 to head back.

Reading the paperback I sometimes caught myself skimming. I found it easier to focus on the text on the phone. This time I’m doing most of my reading on the iPhone. I really want to savour the words.

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?

On a recent trip to New York, I wished I had a Kindle for convenience. I'm a luddite usually, and it's just the electronic toy for me. It would be handy, and I'm attracted to all the free classic titles. But the Kindle only substitutes for a paperback. If it trims away the fat from book publishing, that's fine with me. People will still always want beautiful hardcovers and rare editions. The Kindle makes room for fine presses and encourages publishers to make books beautiful as objects unto themselves. No more of these crappy glued bindings, please! If the Kindle helps things move that way, I'm all for it. I kind've want one, so I can have all of Montgomery with me all the time. A good analogy is the way that music collectors still buy vinyl, and bands that aspire to making lasting contributions to music still issue vinyl for those collectors. No one worries that iPods will kill the collectible vinyl industry. It's the same thing with books.

Wilson's third book, What Price Liberty, was published recently by Faber and, as befits a member of this pack who look forward while looking back, his was among the first books to be sold online - not through Amazon and other similar websites, but to be downloaded for whatever price people chose to pay. Based on the model used by Radiohead for their last album, the publisher made it free to access (ideally to be read on a Sony e-reader, Kindle electronic book, or even a normal computer) and asked for donations. "What was very pleasing was that some people came back and paid after they'd read it," says Wilson.

You start doing random searches, and the results are scary. How many books reference the wood chuck chuck question? Let’s graph my books by publishing date. Can we use a bayesian network to classify my books by genre? Can we write a script to rip cover art from Amazon.com? The possibilities are endless.

But both versions of the Kindle are missing what makes print newspapers such a perfect delivery vehicle for news: graphic design. The Kindle presents news as a list—you're given a list of sections (international, national, etc.) and, in each section, a list of headlines and a one-sentence capsule of each story. It's your job to guess, from the list, which pieces to read. This turns out to be a terrible way to navigate the news.

Every newspaper you've ever read was put together by someone with an opinion about which of the day's stories was most important.

I've been dreading this, but let me get my prediction out now: The iPhone is a Kindle killer.