I’m happy to report that my interview with Bob Stein (computer pioneer, as Wikipedia disambiguates him), titled “Becoming Book-Like: Bob Stein and the Future of the Book,” is now available in the new issue of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.

The title of the interview comes from the following snippet of our conversation (Bob is speaking about a realization he had in 1981 about the future of the book):

The “aha” moment I had was that adding a microprocessor to the mix meant that producer-driven media, like movies and television, were going to be transformed into user-driven media. For me, the crucial thing — and this happened in the process of writing the paper for Britannica — was when I wrestled with the question of “what’s a book?” and “what happens when we make it electronic?” I realized that everything was going to become book-like in the sense of being user-driven and that the ways in which a user interacts with content becomes an important part of her experience.

I love the way that Bob upends conventional wisdom by defining the book as an active, user-driven medium and the way he foresees digital media becoming more, and not less, “book-like” in the future. “Becoming book-like” also points to the many ways in which new media remediate old media.

The interview is presented in CommentPress, a wonderful theme for WordPress developed by Bob’s Institute for the Future of the Book that allows readers to attach comments to specific paragraphs of text. I encourage you to visit the journal and leave your responses in the comments.