Institute for the Future of the Book, based in Brooklyn, aims to combine new ways of thinking with new media to forge a new path for expression. The institute, which was founded in 2004, is on its way to releasing the first version of Sophie, an "all-purpose tool" for creating multimedia texts. Like the institute itself, Sophie's mission is both simple and complex: to help authors easily create books that use any medium. Recently, Ben Vershbow, one of the institute's fellows, wrote a fascinating three-part meditation on both the past and the future of the book on the institute's blog. This article presents an interview with Vershbow discussing how the book is developing, both in terms of what is happening and what could be happening, good and bad.