Past and Present at if:book

Last week, our friend Bob Stein at the Institute for the Future of the Book marked a couple of very cool anniversaries: first, of the release in 1984 of the very first titles from the Criterion Collection, laserdisc editions of King Kong and Citizen Kane; second, of the release in 1989 of Robert Winter’s CD Companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Twenty-five and twenty years ago, respectively, these projects took enormous steps toward developing the kind of integrated media environments on which many of us at MediaCommons work today.

Those anniversaries are particularly timely, coinciding as they do with an interview with Bob on this week’s On the Media, thinking about the future of the book as a social space for engagement between authors and readers, and for engagement among readers.

It’s that kind of engagement that we hope to foster here at MediaCommons, and that we’ve begun developing through our new profile system; we’re hoping to transform the ways that scholars work with one another in much the same way that Criteron transformed our interactions with film and Voyager transformed our thinking about what a book can do.