The first pop­u­lar capa­bil­i­ty for dig­i­tal mul­ti­me­dia was in the ear­ly 1990s. Wide­spread own­er­ship of col­or mon­i­tors had come about. CD ROM play­ers became rea­son­ably priced. And sound cards for PCs also became avail­able at rea­son­able prices.

The first dig­i­tal mul­ti­me­dia infor­ma­tion prod­ucts were on CDs and sold in places such as Radio Shack, movie rental stores, some book­stores, and mag­a­zine ads. Mul­ti­me­dia meant both inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, such as inter­nal links, and diverse media, such as sound, video, slide shows, and the like. To cre­ate a CD required expen­sive author­ing soft­ware that was dif­fi­cult to learn but was nonethe­less less dif­fi­cult than actu­al pro­gram­ming. The promise of dig­i­tal mul­ti­me­dia cre­at­ing a rev­o­lu­tion in pub­lish­ing was assumed by all.

But as it turned out, it didn’t hap­pen.

Today many pun­dits claim that the promise of dig­i­tal mul­ti­me­dia pub­lish­ing has nev­er been real­ized. For the most part, that’s true. It seems like we are not much clos­er to grace­ful­ly inte­grat­ing inter­ac­tiv­i­ty and mul­ti­me­dia into text than we were twen­ty-five years ago.

There are many rea­sons for this. The web super­seded CD pub­lish­ing before such pub­lish­ing devel­oped very far. Yet, the web was not near­ly as mul­ti­me­dia-robust as dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion pub­lished on CDs. Most peo­ple focused on mak­ing the web a com­mer­cial suc­cess rather than an inno­v­a­tive read­ing suc­cess. The web plat­form itself had mul­ti­me­dia pro­to­cols that were dif­fi­cult to make sense of. Geeks, not cre­ative peo­ple, con­trolled the direc­tion of the web for a long time. Peo­ple didn’t like to read on their com­put­ers any more than they had to in order to do their jobs. And cul­ture always lags well behind tech­nol­o­gy.

Dig­i­tal book read­ers became fea­si­ble at the end of the 1990s but were expen­sive. They were very crude (e.g., low res­o­lu­tion) and did not become pop­u­lar. In any event, they were nei­ther inter­ac­tive nor mul­ti­me­dia.

Then the ebook-smart­phone-tablet rev­o­lu­tion mate­ri­al­ized at the end of the first decade of the new mil­len­ni­um.

For sev­er­al years the rev­o­lu­tion was in the hands of geeks. But as inex­pen­sive author­ing soft­ware and ser­vices became avail­able, the rev­o­lu­tion start­ed slow­ly trans­fer­ring into the hands of cre­ative peo­ple (e.g., writ­ers). The web with HTML5 can now han­dle mul­ti­me­dia grace­ful­ly, but HTML5 is still rel­a­tive­ly new. HTML5 promis­es to be the bedrock of bookapp (book in app for­mat) devel­op­ment for smartphones/tablets in the future. Phones and tablets have pro­vid­ed con­sumers a more com­fort­able means of view­ing dig­i­tal mul­ti­me­dia than PCs, lap­tops or the orig­i­nal B&W Kin­dles. And the new mobile mar­ket for read­ing is huge.

<audio> </audio>

<video> </video>

<object> </object>

<input> </input>

<script> </script>

The stage is now set for eas­i­ly and inex­pen­sive­ly cre­at­ing dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion and enter­tain­ment prod­ucts that inte­grate inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, mul­ti­me­dia, and text; and the view­ing pub­lic world­wide final­ly has the right instru­ments at the right price to com­fort­ably enjoy inno­va­tion in mul­ti­me­dia pub­lish­ing. One can now buy a used high-res­o­lu­tion tablet on eBay for under $20.

New capa­bil­i­ties and new (and young) cre­ators gen­er­ate new lan­guage. Today mul­ti­me­dia seems to be an obso­lete term. Per­haps diverse media or enhanced ebook are bet­ter terms. Since you can inte­grate mul­ti­me­dia into bookapps even more adroit­ly than into ebooks, the new term diverse media seems broad­er and there­fore bet­ter. What­ev­er you call it—and I call it diverse media—the tech­nol­o­gy has turned the pub­lish­ing indus­try upside down.

But this is the begin­ning, not the end. Print­ed books are in decline. Ebooks are boom­ing, a boom which is like­ly to accel­er­ate. And some of us think that the ulti­mate book tech­nolo­gies are web­books and bookapps, not ebooks. In any event, the next half-cen­tu­ry will be the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary and most excit­ing in pub­lish­ing since Guten­berg’s print­ing tech­nol­o­gy over 500 years ago spread through Europe like a tsuna­mi.

The big ques­tion is, will print­ed books still be alive in 2030? Not a chance! 

Diverse media dig­i­tal books are the future.