The advantages of digital technology "are so weighted toward collaboration that people will tear down the existing structures and build something new," Stein said while sitting among the jammed but now rarely touched bookshelves in his Brooklyn home.
Head of the ambitiously named Institute for the Future of the Book, Stein is one of a collection of programmers, philosophers and other deep thinkers who debate where things are heading at conferences such as Books in Browsers and on websites such as Reading 2.0.
"Bob's ambition is really to change how people think about the book," said Brian O'Leary, a founder of consulting firm Magellan Media.
Stein, 64, has a history tied to media innovation. In the early 1980s he worked in Los Angeles on an effort to create a digital encyclopedia for home-computer maker Atari. He then started, with some friends and his former wife, a company dubbed Voyager. The firm gave birth to Criterion Collection, a video distributor that pioneered the use of interactive features, initially on laserdisc, a predecessor to the DVD. Voyager also published multimedia CD-ROMs, such as one on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, using techniques that since have become commonplace on the Web.
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