On Tuesday, Atria, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, will publish its first ‘smart book’ — that is, a book equipped with a smart chip attached to its cover, so that if a bookstore patron taps the book’s RFID-enabled sticker with an NFC-enabled smartphone, the phone will bring up a website with additional information to convince you to buy it. Appropriately, the pioneering book is The Impulse Economy: Understanding Mobile Shoppers and What Makes Them Buy , by Gary Schwartz. As Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy points out, this technology would be much more interesting if the chip lead to content that would enhance the reading of the book, as opposed to simply bringing up marketing content that loses its purpose as soon as the book is purchased. We’re imagining a future book filled with stickers to tap on the inside to bring up extra content as you read, which is something we’d definitely be interested in. Until then, we’ll pass.
[via Jacket Copy]