A first highlight at the opening night of the conference was Bob Stein‘s Keynote on the future of books. Hard to believe that I had never come across him and his project “Sophie“, a software that can be seen as the web 2.0 version of the book. It is a networked multimedia authoring tool. Stein used it for his presentation too and before I know what he was going to talk about, I noticed that he was not using Power Point or Keynote and suspected that he was using some nerdy presentation tool that lets you script presentations in Python or some other cool language. Probably I would have downloaded such a tool too – testing obscure software for the fun of it is my favorite pastime after all. Anyway, the concept behind Sophie is really cool and I suggest you download it. While I’m typing this, Sophie is reading American Poetry to me. Very cool. I must show it to the folks at Literaturwerkstatt.