As we (and I unfortunately have to include myself in that "we") spend the next few days making fun of a not-tiny number of religious believers, we should also maybe take a look at where the book that inspires them has gone. In specific, my Kindle- and iPad-toting friends should be thinking about how their electronic books could be radically better than they are today.
This article could open their eyes. If you want to see the future of interactive, useful books (even fiction), you should strongly consider reading one of the many innovative electronic editions of the Bible.
Side note: this isn't a new phenomenon. As people were just starting to really think about hypertext in the early 1980's, one group had already nailed it: Bible concordances. They were mostly ignored because of the non-overlap between strong Bible readers and the hypertext community. Around 1987, I created some hypertext-producing software that I tried to sell to one of the publishers I worked for, and one of the senior editors asked if it could create something as good as what she used at home. I got a copy of the software she was using, was pretty amazed, put my tail between my legs, and slunk off.
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