I'm surprised I didn't know this one already: http://interactions.acm.org/

Interactions is a bimonthly publication of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and is distributed to all members of SIGCHI. Lots of interesting things in here and broader than I expected, e.g.:

I rediscovered this Boing Boing post that was shared by Mark Kusnicki last year:

Designers Irene Pereyra and Tom Klinkowstein recently exhibited their wall-sized digram called "A Day in the Life of a Networked Designer's Smart Things or A Day in a Designer's Networked Smart Things, 2030." The map not only presents a narrative of how a designer "gets things done with the help of all her smart things" but at a higher level also seems to hint at how we may deal with mass amounts of information in the future.

Medialab-Prado issues a call for the submission of projects to be
carried out as part of the Interactivos?'08: Vision Play event,
which will take place from 30 May to 14 June 2008 in Madrid, Spain. Deadline: 25th April

Project development advanced workshop
Lead by: Álvaro Cassinelli, Simone Jones

With the participation of the research group Light, space and

Here's an interesting paper from PARC. I don't buy the premise -- to create a 3D virtual book -- but the paper raises some useful overlaps with our smart book idea, e.g. references, context, vocabulary.

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/card04book.html

Abstract: This paper describes the 3Book, a 3D interactive visualization of a codex book as a component for various digital library and sensemaking systems. The book is designed to hold large books and to support sensemaking operations by readers. The book includes methods in which the automatic semantic analysis of the book's content is used to dynamically tailor access. (Update)

One option for 'automating links' in the smartbook might be to use 2D barcodes to link to the virtual version of the book, plus additional resources etc. This post assesses potential for 2D barcodes incl. prelim. SWOT analysis.

Kevin Kelly's prescient 1994 book Out of Control is online its entirety, searchable, linkable etc. This chapter covers the smart book concept as envisioned early on, naturally enough by one of the progenators of dataspace: Mark Weiser at Xerox Parc

http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch10-b.html

The research labs of Xerox in Palo Alto, California (PARC), invented, but unfortunately never exploited, the signature elements of the first friendly Macintosh computers. Not to be burned twice, PARC intends to fully exploit yet another radical (and potentially profitable) concept brewing in their labs now. Mark Weiser, young and cheerful, is director of a Xerox initiative to view the office as a superorganism -- a networked being composed of many interlinked parts.

The glassy offices of PARC perch on a Bay Area hill overlooking Silicon Valley. When I visit Weiser he is wearing a loud yellow shirt flanked by red suspenders. He smiles constantly, as if inventing the future was a big joke and I'm in on it. I take the couch, an obligatory furnishing in hacker dens, even posh hacker dens like these at Xerox. Weiser is too animated to sit; he's waving his arms -- a marker in one hand -- in front of a huge white board that runs from the floor to the ceiling. This is complicated, his arms say, you are going to need to see it. The picture Weiser begins drawing on the white board looks like a diagram of a Roman army. Down at the bottom are one hundred small units. Above it are ten medium-size units. Perched at the top level is one large unit. The army that Weiser is drawing is a field of Room Organisms.

What I really want, Weiser is telling me, is an mob of tiny smart objects. One hundred small things throughout my office that have a uniform, dim awareness of each other, of themselves, and of me. My room becomes a supercolony of quasi-smart bits. What you want, he says, is every book on your shelf to have a chip embedded in it so that it keeps track of where it is in the room, when it was last open, and to what page. The chip might even have a dynamic copy of the book's index that will link itself to your computer database when you first bring the book into the room. The book now has a community presence. All information stored on a shelf as, say, books or videotapes are implanted with a cheap chip to communicate both where they are and what they are about.

The “Smart Tagged” Book that is Smart, Readable and Searchable:
A Third Option for Publishers and a Potential Motorola – Google – Lulu.com – Beal Centre Collaboration

Prepared by Robert K. Logan ()

The “Smart Tagged” Book that is Smart, Readable and Searchable:
A Third Option for Publishers

A Potential Motorola – Google – Lulu.com – Beal Centre Collaboration

Abstract: We are proposing a book that is smart, searchable and readable. We will analyze this opportunity using the New Product Filter developed at the Beal Centre.

Family Inchoate:
Coterminous Kinship in Emergent Game Worlds

Prepared by Mark Outhwaite | March 2008.

On Friday Feb. 1st, I'll be speaking in this Ryerson University-organized international conference: