I recently quoted Craig Mod in a post about NYC’s attempt to catch up to Silican Valley as a tech center. Here’s an excerpt from “Post-Artifact Books and Publishing,” Mod’s blog post about the nature of books and what digital means for them in the future:

“Take a set of encyclopedias and ask, ‘How do I make this digital?’ You get a Microsoft Encarta CD. Take the philosophy of encyclopedia-making and ask, ‘How does digital change our engagement with this?’ You get Wikipedia.

When we think about digital’s effect on storytelling, we tend to grasp for the lowest hanging imaginative fruits. The common cliche is that digital will ‘bring stories to life.’ Words will move. Pictures become movies. Narratives will be choose-your-own-adventure. While digital does make all of this possible, these are the changes of least radical importance brought about by digitization of text. These are the answers to the question, ‘How do we change books to make them digital?’ The essence of digital’s effect on publishing requires a subtle shift towards the query: ‘How does digital change books?'”