Manufacturing spimes: building the book as a digital and analog object

A conversation at lunch today with superpatron Bill Tozier about building books that were also digital objects prompted this question.

Let's say for sake of argument that you wanted to print books that were also the delivery vehicle for the source code / original text of the book.  What technology would you use, and how would you manufacture the resulting object?

The minimum of this is to print a URL on the book pointing at a web source for the source code, but that's doable now, so the cool factor is low.  A slightly more snazzy approach makes that URL machine readable, or embeds it in an RFID device which is queryable, but in any case the information content of the book is low.

A second approach I suppose would be to burn digital media and embed or insert it in the book packaging.  The old school way to do this is a CD-ROM, as my prized Storage Mania issue of Mediamatic (1994) predicts:

According to some estimates, by the end of this century the total amount of computer memory in the world will be greater than the total amount of information in the world. The curves will intersect. At this point the demand for storage space will give way to a demand for information.

By that time historians will look back with a smile on our current worries about information overload. Once the data banks are up-to-date they will begin storing information directly at its source. Fresh info will instantly be slurped up by a hungry archive; first come, first served. All intelligent agents will be bought away from their bosses by desperate archivists, to join the rat race for unarchived data.

Any better suggestions welcome (high data rate RFID?)

For more on spimes see Bruce Sterling in Wired, Oct 2004.

(for the "future of the book" category)

Comments

[Jonathan]

Well, I think in the longer term, the spimey book will be one that's printed on-demand when and where you want it. Your copy is just a material manifestation of the "real" book that lives in cyberspace, which is collaborative, annotatable, trackbackable, or what have you. I think things like Safari from O'Reilly are already pointing in this direction.

In the nearer-term, I don't have any better ideas than URLs, barcodes, RFIDs...

[Bill Tozier]

We once owned a Cauzin Stripreader....