Incremental Blogger, eBook publishing with a twist: I’ve been wondering about a twist on the eBook concept–that may better be characterized as “Book Apps” where the application appears to be more of a book than a software program. […] Microsoft’s Visual Studio is kind of going this way with its plugins, extensible help system, and the like. There are even online training materials and demos. But it’s interesting to think of what the environment might be like if you take the “reading” infrastructure even further. Imagine the reading infrastructure more tightly coupled within the framework. I’m thinking about the book being king. When you start Visual Studio for the first time, for instance, it would look more like a book than an IDE. It’s focused more on helping you decide what you want to do and getting you going. How many times have you picked up heavy workhorse applications like Visual Studio for the first time and asked yourself: “OK, now what do I do?”

Very intriguing idea.