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No, because I'm going to do a book, finally, of Morris Lessmore, because that needs to be, too. They're all going to be different. The short film -- it's the same story. It's like you can do Shakespeare in modern dress or totally in silhouette. You can do it on a stage. You can do it as a film. You can do that story in many different ways and it will play a million different ways, even though it's the same story. I feel like what we're going through right now is we'll be able to tell stories in different venues, and each one will have a slightly different interpretation or a slightly different way of being powerful, I hope.

A book, it's still that visceral you-and-your-imagination way. With the iPad, it's going to be more interactive, and I'm still -- I see great things ahead for a way of experiencing a narrative on an iPad that's so much more involving. I think we just scratched the surface. We're like in that time in TV when they would just show people juggling. We're way at the beginnings of how cool this could be. But reading a book is always going to be that lovely, perfect, one-on-one thing.

What's interesting also to me is that, as we're planning the book, we figured out a way so that you can point your app at the book and then a third thing happens that you will see. It's this virtual reality stuff that they've developed. From your book will come a 3D image of what's in the book. The books that are flat on the page, when you look at your iPad, you'll be able to see them fly around. If you want, that will also broadcast on your television, and you'll be able to see it really large. So they're all going to kind of maybe start to be components of a story, of a way of experiencing a story.

If it turns out it's just a bunch of tricks, it'll go away, but I think it's going to be more than just a bag of tricks.

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Is the book dead? Not exactly, but it needs to change. The way I would think about that is I'd ask, have we always had libraries? And in fact we have. We had libraries long before we had books and we'll have libraries after we have books. Books are wonderful for many reasons, but they're not the be-all and they're not the end-all and they're not the only impetus that we need. They're just part of it. Edison wax cylinders didn't last forever and neither did vinyl records. They're a part of it, and there are many ways for capturing and preserving our memory. For sure, the tablet world that's just starting to explode to many people feels like asteroid meets dinosaur. It will mark the large-scale end of many forms of media, or a transition.

But there's some things about the book that are very interesting, and one of them has to do with the simple tactile richness. And you see it when you watch the tiniest child interact with a book. Flipping a page, folding a bit of paper. You know it's real hard to make beautiful origami things with a tablet. It's not to say you can't make other wonderful things, and not to say that multitouch isn't going to develop in ways we've hardly begun to imagine. It will. It has to, because we're very touchy-feely animals. But books have that quality and they'll have to coexist. And right now we're in this awkward gear grinding phase. Wouldn't it be great if you took down a book from a library in a hundred years, and as you opened it up, the rest of the memories that are associated with that book were brought to you in some delightful way? Wouldn't it be great if you could take a tablet to a book signing and have it properly autographed? You can't right now, and I'll tell you a story about that.

I went to visit Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka many years ago and Arthur had to go pee, so he left me alone in his library while he went out. And his library's filled with books. I went over to one wall and I pulled down a book from the A section. They were all alphabetized by author. As I took down an Isaac Asimov and there was a very sweet note from Isaac written in the cover that said, "Dear Arthur, I can't think you enough for your help with this book, and I think you'll see on page 47 the idea that I was able to work into the story."

I thought, isn't that great? I put it back. I took down a Bradbury. Same thing, a beautiful note for Arthur. And Michael Crichton, lovely. Every book in the library that he had seemed to be a personal love letter from the author who wrote it. Right now electronic media is nowhere in carrying that sort of personal touch. I wouldn't say it's nowhere, but there's something very simple that books have managed to do, and that is they connect us over thousands of years now to past generations in the most simple, human way. A little chicken scratch diary note from your great-great-grandmother in her book that's almost now falling apart, but what could feel more special? We don't yet have that kind of tactile connection with electronic media, and that's a great opportunity in years ahead.

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Physical books are dead. Now what does dead mean? Dead means they will be a rare luxury. So nothing's dead. Opera is not dead. But the physical book is not sustainable, and it's the worst way to deliver something. The manufacturing costs are high.

There's just all sorts of reasons. And it's a classic bits-and-atoms story -- storing those atoms, replicating the economic models where they're different in each country, but in this country where you can return the books if you're a bookstore, and you can discount them.

You can do all sorts of things that are so related to the industrial age. It's like making an automobile. The reason an automobile won't turn into something digital is because you really do carry physical things. And instantiation is physical. That's what it is. You may use computers to help design it, you may provide the fuel to guide it, to maybe even drive it automatically.

But books aren't physical. We just made them physical. And the fact that we did make them physical, it's been an extraordinary inconvenience. Very few people get them. And in fact, they're not even easy to read. If I'm in bed with a Kindle, it's actually more comfortable. I can do it with one hand. I'm not sitting there, this way, and now I'm looking at it, and now I've got to turn the page and this and that.

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Oh, books are doing great. My wife started the San Francisco Center for the Book, which is all about hand-making books in new and different ways. It's an art form, where the book structure is the art form. They have lead type, people are taking classes in how to do book bindings, but there are book bindings where the book might be round or unfold or explode or be encapsulated in titanium. So new and different kinds of what is a book. And there are certain threads that are still there. There's maybe a narrative thread, there's maybe a text that sort of brings it together that makes it a whole.

But the physical experience of books, I think, is starting to get outside of the realm of just cheap, industrial processes into artists' hands. So the books that we have are going to be special because they're physical. Otherwise, why bother? I don't think we're going to mourn the loss of the phonebook. Who cares? Yes, there are going to be some people who say, "Oh, we lost something." But mostly, catalogs? Make them go away. But beautiful books, done well, that are physical, maybe somewhat electronic, somewhat networked, where they're going?

I think there's a lot of life still in the concept of a long, single-author narrative that has an idea that can move you someplace. Something that can take where you are now and have you think something different. That's the role that really, I think, is the essential piece of books that we have to have going forward, which we haven't done well on the Web yet.