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Future of Reading in the WSJ

Usually I roll my eyes at future-of-books/future-of-reading articles. But this guy knows what he's talking about.

Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.

What will this mean for the books themselves? Perhaps nothing more than a few strategically placed words or paragraphs. Perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind. We'll have to see.

This correlates directly to what we found during our research on the StartwithXML Project.  The problem? There are no standardized descriptive tags right now. There are tags to describe entire books, but not describe parts of books.

At every turn in the article, I expected to start with the eye-rolling. But I never did. 

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