I've started work on selecting and post processing the images from the Tasmanian shoot early this year for a course run by Atkins Technicolour in Adelaide that teaches me the basics in producing a digital photography book. It's a dummy run in self-publishing to see what is involved in producing an artist's print book, as distinct from a fine art photographer's print book. The digital future is already here and the publishers are no longer the gatekeeper.

The course requires 50 images ---which is too many for my purposes. I suspect the commercial basis of course is for people to produce a book of their weddings or holiday trip. I see a disruptive technology at work that changes the relationship between author and reader plus the virtues of the e-book.

My immediate purpose is to use the digital book as the basis for a submission for an exhibition at Landscape Art Research Queenstown [LARQ], which is a non-profit studio/gallery in 2006 set up by Raymond Arnold, a Tasmanian based Australian artist/printmaker.

Beyond that I have a digital book in draft form--an e-book--- since, as an author, I am producing the original work in digital form to begin with. So I can continue to work on and experiment with the digital form --eg., with hyperlinks---since this is writing/imaging for the web.

On a broader perspective the Google Book project, along with rapid developments in e-readers, has ensured that the book, as a digital file, will remain at the heart of our culture for the foreseeable future. Enhanced editions' and single-book apps where the author provides a wealth of extra digital material that is embedded in the text, from audio recordings of the author reading to music composed by the author, are already beginning to appear. This is pushing into new territory that takes a more interactive turn than books have allowed.

What is going to go is the dregs of the publishing world: disposable books produced to be consumed once and then tossed. With the iPad we have a platform for consuming rich-content in digital form and we are going to see new forms of story telling emerging from this device.