In July, the Institute for the Future of the Book will release Sophie, which they describe as “an open-source platform for creating and reading electronic books for the networked environment”. The beta release will be available even sooner, for readers of the if:book blog. It will be interesting to see what Sophie allows a writer of digital documents to do. Of course, writers for the web can always use Flash or any number of other tools, but the lower the learning curve, the better, in my opinion. Not every good writer has the time or inclination to learn XHTML, CSS, Flash, ActionScript, etc.

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