Stein+and+Visel.+Sophie+and+the+Future+of+Reading+and+Writing

=** Stein, Robert and Visel, Daniel. “Sophie and the Future of Reading and Writing.” **= //Forum for the Future of Higher Education, Excerpted from Forum Futures 2007.// Cambridge, Mass, 2007. 57-60. Print.

**Abstract**
"In the 1440s, Johannes Gutenberg invented a printing press that enabled the mass production of books. In the ensuing five and half centuries, books—printed pages bound together—have served as the central mechanism for storing and transmitting knowledge. But their fundamental nature as static, finished products has changed little since Gutenberg’s time. Today, however, the traditional roles of authors and their readers may indeed shift as electronic, screen-based technologies allowing the creation of interactive, networked books are developed and refined. Robert Stein and Daniel Visel of the Institute for the Future of the Book, affiliated with the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, describe the Sophie platform, an all-purpose, user-friendly tool that gives authors control of the form of their work by allowing them to use multimedia to convey their content—without having to rely on expert programmers for support. Stein and Visel believe that Sophie has the potential to blur the lines between reading and writing in ways that printed books simply cannot," (57).

**Argument**
This article aims to discuss the problems with electronic books today, and provide a solution by introducing the Sophie platform. PDFs, XMLs and XHTML coded documents are the most common online books today. However, even though a PDF can contain text, links, audio, and video, it is limited by merely being a “snapshot” of a document. XHTML coding can be faulty, especially if the content involves diagrams like those present in a math book. One person will not always see what another person does on the Internet, especially if he or she is looking at it on a separate server. The other argument the article makes is that these types of electronic books don’t last as long as their printed counter-parts since the Internet is always evolving. Books that are designed today may not display themselves the same way on an operating system ten years from now. Sophie was created because while the Internet is an ideal writing environment, it is not an ideal reading environment for long-term works. Sophie is aimed primarily at the world of education: it can teach students not just writing, but how to incorporate multimedia into their writing. An example the article gives is a book based on a video. Sophie would enable the user to mix text and video, or separate them so they could be viewed at different intervals. In the end, the books we have known and used for centuries will soon be altered and aid in the expansion of human knowledge.

**Key Passages**
"The fundamental nature of books as static, finished products has changed little in more than 500 years," (57).

"Sophie will blur the lines between reading and writing by expanding the capabilities of printed books. It is an all-purpose tool that will allow users to easily create books with any sort of media hand," (57).

"It is a mistake to think that a book is merely a container for text; a well-designed book presents text in a useful way. Similarly, Sophie is more than just a wrapper for media; it will allow users to structure information intelligently," (57).

"While Sophie can be used in many settings, it is aimed squarely at the word of education," (57).

“While reading a book seems like a solitary activity on the surface, underneath it has always been a quietly social experience, a communication between the author and the reader across time and space,” (58).

“A physical book has pages. We take it for granted that pages follow pages in a sequential order, in the same way that spoken words follow each other,” (59).

“Imagine a copy of Madame Bovary in French. When you move your mouse over a sentence, it might be spoken aloud in English. The same book could be set up so that it reads itself aloud, turning pages as it goes so that a student learning French can follow along,” (60).

Selected Works Cited
Had no specific noted works used in the writing.

ROBERT STEIN is director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. He can be reached at caxton@ear thlink.net. DANIEL VISEL is a researcher at the Institute for the Future of the Book. He can be reached at dan@futureofthebook.org.