On 10 December, Bob Stein announced the "soft launch" of the Web site for The Institute for the Future of the Book, which is funded by The Macarthur Foundation, The Mellon Foundation, The Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, and Columbia University.

From their Web site:

"The mission of the Institute for the Future of the Book is to play an important role in developing the form and function of books in the digital era.

The institute will be a place where artists, scholars, and technologists collaborate to address a broad range of questions, such as:

•  how to define and assure authority of the text within a dynamic medium

•  how readers know “where they are” within the more complex structures afforded by digital books

•  how to integrate text with audio and video so that they do not work at cross-purposes. (This is key to the development of new rhetorical devices at the center of intellectual discourse.)

•  working to define new ways of navigating and parsing complex “data spaces” – e.g. what high-level
alternatives to the index might be devised?

• typography and iconography designed specifically for the screen

•  in a wired world, how to encourage and enable readers to link to each other and to the author

•  what is the best way to take several thousand years of analog culture into the digital era in a way that respects the original form but that also exploits the potential of emerging technologies to help readers see, hear, and read better?"