The LazerBook is Basex’  foray into the future of book publishing and distribution and was conceptualized by Jonathan Spira.  It does, of course, not exist today, and probably will not be practical for some time.

However, in carefully analyzing the direction that the book publishing industry must take, it has become apparent to us that the prediction that “books will disappear” is ill-advised. Most notably, pundits have predicted that books, as we now know them, will be replaced by will be replaced by electronic tablets, perhaps similar to screens on a laptop computer.  Sony, in fact, tried this approach with its ill-fated Bookman product, introduced in 1991.   In our view, customers were predictably slow to turn to a pocket television-screen-sized device for their reading pleasure.

In their February 26, 1996 issue, Business Week led with a cover story on the latest phenomonon to hit the corporate world — the Intranet. Jonathan Spira takes a look at some of the article’s assumptions and questions the reasoning that went into making them.

Corporations are ’seizing the Web as a swift way to streamline–even transform–their organizations. It is important to remember that many organizations adopted the Web and the Internet without first giving thought to their own internal business processes and planned strategies.

A fresh look at the digital revolution in light of the full history of human writing technologies – Packed with illustrations

“Celebrate” Information Overload Awareness Day: August 12

The Information Age has brought with it many advances which have become part of everyday life, including the Web and mobile phones, not to mention e-mail, text and instant messaging, and social networks. While there are many benefits to having these tools and modes of communication, they also bring with them a costly side effect: the problem of information overload.

Have you ever wondered what information-related issue creates the most anxiety amongst middle managers? The fact that information overload would be near the top of the list might surprise you. In advance of 2008, Basex, a knowledge economy research and advisory firm, named information overload as the expected ‘problem-of-the-year’. They estimated that over the course of 2008, an estimated $650bn would be lost in the United States due to reduced productivity and throttled innovation. Additionally, their research concluded that as much as eight hours of worker productivity per week would be lost because of this phenomenon.

Ever feel like you need a break from work just to get your work done? You’re not alone. Information workers, who comprise about 63% of the U.S. work force, are each bombarded with 1.6 gigabytes of information on average every day through emails, reports, blogs, text messages, calls and more, according to preliminary data from a report coming later this year, an update of the 2003 “How Much Information?” report.

Comprehensive book that covers the significant changes the business world is facing. The knowledge workforce today is the lynchpin to an organization’s success, as the world morphs into a knowledge economy. This change represents a significant challenge to managers, who are accustomed to managing workers in more traditional roles. (more…)

50% of all searches fail in a manner that the person doing the search recognizes as a failure.  A far more significant problem is that 50% of the searches believed to have succeeded failed, but the person doing the search simply doesn’t realize it.  As a result, that person uses information that is at best out of date but more often incorrect or just not the right data.  When the “bad” information is then used in a document or communication, there is a cascading effect that further propagates the incorrect information.

It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million people and television only 13 years.

It took the Internet a mere four years to reach that number. Just last month there were 10 billion Web searches performed and most people didn’t find what they were looking for. Here’s to less information!