It’s very likely that the tradition will continue with paper books for a very long time after our book-shelves were replaced with one little device. After all, a signed book is not a book but a collectible item, like a signed baseball or a signed t-shirt. They are stored and displayed differently than their mundane non-signed counterparts.

Eventually the books being signed will be custom-printed because there won’t be any more mass production. But what if we could replace signatures with something digital, and better?

At first I though that you could have your digital book signed. That’s possible, to have a PDF that has the signature in it. That’s trivial to generate automatically so it doesn’t have any value. If it has dedication, that is, your name hand-writen by the author, then it gets trickier to generate; and more valuable. But this is the digital age, the future, we can do better than that. What if you have a PDF where the picture of the cover of the book is not the usual one but a picture of you with the author.

Now, that’s something! The signing booth would now be a photo booth. After you take the picture they’d generate the PDF which you could download instantly by bluetooth or with a code they give you. Now suddenly the digitally signed book is something even more valuable than the usual signature.

If you plan on developing the software and do the hardware integration for this, let me know, I might be interested.

It would be very simple to have a web app of people lending each other books across the world in a very organized and systematic way. The reason is that there’s no danger for the lender, the book will come back automatically. It’s not the same as lending a real dead tree paper book.

The solution is simple: don’t make it automatic for books to come back. Have the borrower have to press a button to return it. And if the borrower never does then you lose the book. Then you would only lend them to people you trust (not in a p2p-network way) or when you don’t care about losing the book.

What about book swapping? I don’t see a way to implement book swapping without allowing a systematic peer to peer network to exist. That leads me to the issue of DRM, which I’m not going to talk about now.

Reviewed by Daniel Magliola. Thank you!

You can still get a free-of-cost copy of Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation at its original site. Actually, the book is now released under a Creative Common license, thank you Shriram!

This is, actually, old news. The book has been in paperback for quite a while, but I neglected to publish the post at that time. Today, a chat at the Esperanto meeting about Lulu (and how useful it is for Esperantists, that make books nobody wants to publish) reminded me about the post and I’m now publishing it.