Science Online Bay Area sponsored a truly inspiring presentation at Swissnex Tuesday night 7/17 on the rapidly evolving e-book sphere, where diversity already borders on multiple personality disorder. Peter Brantley sketched the Net as the world’s largest public-works project and tech firms as the prime shapers of 21st-century literature. (Stop and think about that.) John Tayman of Byliner described his medium-length wedge into the literary world; Ron Martinez of Aerbook showed off his newly launched Aerbook Maker, whereby we can all create gorgeous multimedia works in the art form formerly known as books. Librarian-in-Black Sarah Houghton fumed about the middlemen barring libraries and their readers from borrowing e-books — a problem to which I suspect the epub offers a solution; we’ll see. Stay tuned for more news as it happens!
