Eoin Purcell

One of the compelling lessons of the digital music revolution was that people wanted to acquire and share songs, not albums. The analogies to books are imperfect, because books tend to be more of an essential organic whole than albums, but even with books, especially reference or tutorial books, it’s certainly possible that someone wants only part of a book.

Tom O’Reilly pushes the boat out
I think sometimes that there are two publishing worlds. One where things like this happen and one where they don’t. The key here though is that this concept is actually only the fruit of previous thinking as another quote makes obvious:

This capability is a direct outgrowth of the Xquery infrastructure we originally built for SafariU, our remixable textbook initiative.

That in itself is impressive. It shows foresight, a willingness to plan for possibilities beyond the current need and a desire to be able to reach distant goals.

Impressed
Eoin