Sophie - The Future of Reading

How NOT to create a digital media scholarship platform: the history of the Sophie 2.0 project

“…Before even the original Sophie, Bob Stein would try to build a multimedia editing platform of one form or another at least twice. While running the Voyager multimedia electronic publishing company, Bob Stein oversaw the creation of the Expanded Books toolkit, a software that allowed educators to create and edit their own editions of books on floppy disks (Rüger et al, 2008). Stein is described in a 1996 profile of his Voyager company as "the most far-out digital publishing visionary in the new world or the least effective businessman alive -or both" and that "Many people who work for Stein mention his tremendous intellectual passion and enthusiasm -and an almost equal number cite his short attention span and complete disregard for detail" (Virshup, 1996).…”

“…Stein also led The Night Kitchen company that created TK3, the predecessor software to Sophie that was a closed source product (Rüger et al, 2008). TK3 was probably the most successful of all of Stein's efforts to create a multimedia editor and reading platform.…”

“…Specifically, "The Mellon Foundation approached some of the TK3 team and asked them to build a new multimedia authoring program which would extend TK3 by enabling time-based events and make it able to live on the network. That became Sophie" (Rüger et al, 2008). In their conference paper "Sophie: The Future of Reading" the creators of what would become Sophie 1.0 describe their project as "With Sophie we are tackling the long standing issues as keeping documents and their media accessible for a long time (the 200 year problem) and making electronic books living documents that capture and reflect the readers' interactions and comments (the annotating problem)" (Rüger et al, 2008).…”

“…That became Sophie" (Rüger et al, 2008). In their conference paper "Sophie: The Future of Reading" the creators of what would become Sophie 1.0 describe their project as "With Sophie we are tackling the long standing issues as keeping documents and their media accessible for a long time (the 200 year problem) and making electronic books living documents that capture and reflect the readers' interactions and comments (the annotating problem)" (Rüger et al, 2008). Using funding acquired from the Mellon and the MacArthur foundations, Stein founded the Institute for the Future of the Book in 2004, a think tank that continued his longstanding affiliation with USC but was based in New York (Stein and Visel, 2010).…”

Sophie Tools and Materials in Multimedia Book Creation

“…Sophie is an authoring application for multimedia books [1]- [3]. It unites the features of a word processor and an application like Adobe's Director.…”