I am honored by the journal Library Trends with a guest editorship for a special edition, very tentatively titled "Digital Books and the Impact on Libraries." The edition will focus on mass digitization efforts and their strategic impacts on library trends and workflow, with a focus more on policy than strictly technical issues. Topics will include not just discoverabiity and services integration, but also participative cultures, licensing and rights, privacy, and the unsolved question of preservation archives.

I will also use the opportunity to speculate on the longer term development of new story-telling techniques and mixed media narratives, with conjectures for how this type of work might impact publishing, scholarship, libraries, licensing, preservation, and search providers. As the Booksquare blog noted recently in an open letter to publishers from SXSWi, the trends are toward:

Multi-format storytelling. Cross-platform storytelling. Mixing words and sounds and pictures to extend the story beyond the book. Mixing fiction and reality in the blogosphere and beyond.

Although media-rich participative works are most commonly associated with fiction, publishers are already beginning to experiment with their integration into non-fiction volumes, and I think these will be valuable paths for academics and students as well.

I also want to acknowledge the generosity of Library Trends' publisher, The Johns Hopkins University Press , which has agreed to permit the resulting articles to appear online prior to their formal publication (currently scheduled for the Fall 2008).