The New Book

It looks like the new TK3 is still about a year away from its release, if a November 2004 article by Bob Stein, the mastermind behind the revolutionary e-book authoring environment, is to be believed. Stein writes:

Recently, the Mellon Foundation made a $1.4 million grant to the Institute for the Future of the Book, co-located at the University of Southern California and Columbia University, to develop a completely new version of the TK3 software. TK4 is planned for release in the fall of 2006. It will be completely open source and free to educational institutions, so users can extend the features of TK4 as needed.

If I were an educational institution, and you know that I am, I would be lining up now to get in on the testing phase of this software. Here we have a potential revolution that is about empowering students, not simply upsetting the status quo. Its about learning as creating as collaborating as film as text as audio as integrating knowledge.

If its true that the future of our personal tech devices will be about combining all of the functions we want into one device with a single, simple interface, why can't we imagine that educational media will undergo a similar consolidation?

If tk4 proves to be as useful as it promises, there is no reason why we can't.