A few weeks ago there appeared in my mail a review copy of a wonderful little book, Nicholas in Trouble, by Renee Goscinny and Jean Jacques Sempe (a New Yorker cover artist). It is published by Phaedon (978-0-7148-4813-6).  It caught my attention immediately with a tastefully stamped cloth cover, without jacket, featuring a foil-stamped and embossed vignette in color of a little school boy, quaintly illustrated, with a smile of inner anticipation, on his way somewhere with a briefcase in hand and searchlight pointing the way.

Before I proceed I must urge upon you to go to what is one of the most ingenious, entertaining and—if you or your children start playing one of the games—potentially absorbing web sites I have seen  (http://www.phaidon.com/nicholas).

Since reviewing books is not my assignment for ForeWord, I rarely get review copies, and when I do, I generally send a cordial thank you note and direct the originator to our editorial offices in Traverse City, Michigan, some 780 miles from my home-office in the Hudson Valley, which is 40 miles south of Albany, NY.

As you may have surmised from my opening paragraph literary merit is not what first caught my eye—but bookmaking did—and that led me inside to read through a series of charming and cleverly line-illustrated stories about a French schoolboy who is known as the “Dennis-the-Menace of France,” and whose “adventures and travails of a cheeky and charming little French boy,” were first told over forty years ago. This volume is the fifth and final book of the series translated into English by Anthea Bell.

Visiting the imaginative and interactive web site, complete with animation, get acquainted click-throughs to all the characters, interactive games, downloads, a blog and contact opportunities, also reminded me of how the reach of a book—whether fiction or non-fiction—has been broadened from the limits of our own imaginations and from a dialog between reader and author to  come alive in multiple media, formats and customized applications.

The applications and the potentials are almost dizzying in their siren calls and challenges as well as in their practical and entertaining benefits. I saw this in full force at the three day O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference at the Javitz Center in September. More than 6,500 people—many from abroad—showed up at this event which is primarily focused on the technologies and supply chain of web services, but has also expanded into marketing tracks that should be of great interest to book publishers who are still cautiously exploring the digital universe as more than a marketing tool—but also as a content extension.

Tim O’Reilly, founder and president of O’Reilly Media, is a far-sighted thinker and intellectual innovator, who has developed and advanced the concepts and applications of Web 2.0 which he defines as using the Internet as a platform, information businesses using software as a service, harnessing collective intelligence and user-generated content. It is worth a trip to his web site (http://tim.oreilly.com/) to read his 2005 Web 2.0 article and his 2006 Open Business interview.

There is probably no media industry equal to book publishing that rests on foundations more resistant by their nature to what is taking place in the market place of ideas, communication, information and entertainment. The whole idea of user-generated content runs counter the concept of packaged intellectual property. Yet, we are moving rapidly towards interactive forms of publishing and repurposing original content.

The strong Creative Commons movement (creativecommons.org) and the foundational support for Google’s Book Search project by major library systems provide some of the evidence of challenges to the rigid barriers to accessing intellectual property. The recent benchmark agreement between Google and the AAP and Authors Guild points the way to striking a balance between compensation for intellectual effort and broadening access and application of intellectual property.

While no one is ready to admit they are making any significant money on e-book publishing (outside of the reference and journal market), the success of e-ink and its application in the Kindle and Sony readers and the emergence of the e-Book as a basic format along side the hard bound and paperback editions of books is putting more and more content out there in forms that can be re-purposed into anthologies, mashups, downloads, demand printing drivers for the Expresso Machine’s on site book production utility—and all the customized customer driven applications that will flow from these formats and media

Ultimately, however, all of these new forms of the “book” will simply amplify the reading experience and blend it more seamlessly with interactive and multiple media experiences

The web site for Nicholas in Trouble is a reminder that the distinctive charm and story-telling that an author and illustrator bring to a work are at base what makes all else possible—and the Phaedon web site is only a slice of what is possible in our new Web 2.0 world.

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large