Sophie 1.0 now downloadable: E-text reader-writer with multimedia and network capabilities
Sophie 1.0, intended to make it easier for readers to become writers, is now downloadable in Mac, Windows and Linux flavors. Anyone care to give it a test drive and share impressions?
The software developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book will let you create books, not just read e-texts—into which, by the way, you can insert audios and videos. Click on the left image for a better look at a screenshot of a Sophie book by Sol Gaitan, a Spanish teacher at New York’s Dalton School.
Audio and video embeds will help his students explore how flamenco music helped shaped the style of the poet Federico GarcÃa Lorca (right photo below).
Lets Spanish-lit students insert annotations—just as teacher can
Sophie could also be notable because of its shared annotations capabilities through which readers and writers can 
trade comments. Gaitan’s Spanish-lit students, for example, can do their own annotations, now that he’s offered some examples—read about his use of Sophie and the ability of the software to help motivate students. They can even create books on authors of their choice. Imagine the K-12 and other academic possibilities here. Significantly, Sophie can reel in text and multimedia from a number of sources online—a helpful step toward an age of networked books, a category into which Wikipedia would fall. Videos could actually exist half a world away from the server housing the main books.
During the installation process I thought I saw files marked OLPC flash by. True? Will Sophie be running on One Laptop Per Child’s XO-1?
Vista-related glitches—and more cosmic issues
Alas, for now, I could not read off Sophie on my Vista machine, which was giving me permissions errors, at least when I tried a demo book. I hope the institute will address Vista issues. Let’s root for Linux to gain market share, but for now, Windows OSes are mainstream, and Microsoft eventually will be phasing out XP.
The N question: One of the virtues of traditional novels, as many have noted, is that they take you inside the authors’ heads. Will programs like Sophie be a distraction—forcing novelists, traditionally a low-tech crowd, to adapt to young people’s appetite for multimedia? Or will Sophie-style multimedia help all-text narratives in the end—by making it possible for the young to study them more meaningfully and themselves become better writers? For example, students could hear 19th century English music, watch a video tour of places written up in David Copperfield, and discuss how the sounds and sights of Dickens’ time influenced him, and how, in turn, he depicted his surroundings.
E-book standards angle: No, Sophie is not .epub compatible and in fact includes PDF export capabilities. But I’ll cut the Sophie project some slack because it demonstrates some of what .epub could do in the future, and because the project is noncommercial. If nothing else, let’s hope that .epub gets a shared annotations standard soon.
The library angle: Could public libraries offer Sophie classes and encourage patrons to create multimedia books on, say, local history.
Related, from the Institute’s Future of the Book blog: Developing books in networked communities, a conversation with Don Waters, IFB and NYU libraries to collaborate and a review of Mikita Brottman’s book called The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (question—how will the guilty cotton to a title like that?).
(Thanks to Tamas Simon for the jog. I meant to get to a Sophie update earlier.)
March 28th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Hmmm… Use might be limited until they publish a way to turn this off. It sends your content and local paths off to some group somewhere. And, of course, it’s the Sophie crew that gets to decide what an “error” is, and thus when to send this info.