The Book of the Future, Sliced Into Little, Searchable Pieces: The New Yorker At the Digital Book World conference, held in New York last week, one could hardly pass muster by holding up a stack of pages bound together. The crowd's sensibility was more conceptual; the word that filled the air was "content." This was a fairground for companies like Innodata, DigiServ, Biztegra, and Datamatics, with booths snaking through the hallways of the Hilton Hotel. They passed out business cards and flowcharts, decked out with spritely taglines: "Unleash your inner book ~ just $99." In a conference room, Linda Holliday, the C.E.O. of a digital publishing company called Semi-Linear, leaned against a presenter's table, having just wrapped up a panel discussion on "Making Content Searchable, Findable, and Shareable." She spoke in an excited stream. "A book is an amount of knowledge that I feel good about finishing," she told me. A book is a clump of knowledge that goes together. "Look at a book as a bag of words," suggested Matt MacInnis, another panelist, who had been working on education projects at Apple before forming an interactive-book company called Inkling. "Bag of words," he pointed out, is a computer-science term: a model by which a machine represents natural language. "Computers are terrible at natural language," he said. Humans are shitty at multiplication and division. For a reader searching the Internet for information, he explained, "the word rank is going to be terrible for a bag of words of book length." But a book that is broken up into component parts would show up higher in an online search result, because each discrete section coheres around a single idea, which can be tagged, indexed, and referenced by other sites. This is known in the business as "link juice." During the conference, on Wednesday, Inkling announced it was launching a new "Content Discovery Platform," which would draw searchers from Google into broken-off sections of a book. They've divided about four hundred titles into one hundred and fifty thousand indexed "cards," as they're called - hacked-up book parts organized into key topics. Readers who reach a card through Google can click around on a limited basis. From there, individual cards are available for purchase - and link out to the rest of the chapter, or the whole book. MacInnis explained this to the audience: "We delude them" - customers - "into believing that they're in a book. They're in a Web page. There was a ripple of laughter, cut off by the moderator, who asked, expectantly, "But you want to sell them a book?" "We'll sell them a book," said MacInnis. Or a cow. Or a monkey. We'll sell them the content. When I first spoke to MacInnis, several months ago, he told me that today's digital shelves are the equivalent of a "mechanized horse and carriage." "What they're selling is essentially a book," he said. They haven't added anything. Who cares? He described his approach to publishing as a shift "from being a book to being software. I don't know where that line is, but I think we've already crossed it. Around that time, Holliday's company came out with a publishing platform called Citia, which breaks up a book into modules, pared down, CliffsNotes-style, "without so many illustrative examples," she said. Citia has two book-chunk collections on the market now - "What Technology Wants" and "Predictably Irrational" - with a few more in the works. Speaking on the panel, Holliday threw up her hands, wishing to dispel "the myth that a book is a straight line, or a string of pages," as publishers see it. "Nonfiction is a constellation of ideas that you have to string into a straight line," she said. Holliday envisions a Pinterest-type board, where readers could post their favorite cards. "They might read pieces of hundreds of thousands of books, and not one whole book," she said. Is that so bad? MacInnis, Holliday, and others on the panel were quick to emphasize that they give their attention to nonfiction. In particular, MacInnis said, "we focus on content that people use. You don't use "Fifty Shades of Grey."" He paused, letting the joke sink in. Inkling's titles include textbooks, how-to guides, and cookbooks. "Tasting Beer," displayed on one of Inkling's iPad stations, in its booth at the D.B.W. Expo, begins, "The history of beer is a wide and deeply fascinating subject and deserves a great deal more attention than I'm going to be able to give it in this short chapter." There is more to nonfiction than a mash of facts, after all. A hand shot up in the back of the audience: "What do you think about the impact on readers?" "Curiosity is gasoline," Holliday said. If you change the way you assemble a book, "everything sparks some kind of curious sidebar." "Organize the Internet in the way the human brain operates," MacInnis added. You can enter at just the point you want, and that, to me, is the point of this structure. Often, in this bright future of the book, what you get is something more like a book in its nascent stages. Cards with disparate facts, details, ideas - they are, essentially, notes. Holliday told me that when she pitches Citia to writers, they say, "This is how I work." Each stack of digital files - tagged with search terms, scattered across the Web - can be redistributed as fragments from a book-as-mothership, to which a reader might never return. So what happens to writing? "Some people are such great writers," Holliday said, dreamily. Like Steven Pinker. I could read every word he writes. She has been in touch with him about doing a series of book cards for Citia. He said he would want to write his own. And I was like, great! Illustration by Olimpia Zagnoli