Peter Meyers
Author, A New Kind of Book

Peter Meyers has worked at the intersection of writing and technology for more than two decades. He’s currently writing “A New Kind of Book”. Part how-to guide, part inspirational call-to-action, it seeks to answer the basic question: what can digital books do that can’t be done in print? The heart of the book is a “catalog of ideas”: a collection of dozens of ready-to-use digital book features, most of which Peter designed himself, supplemented by a best-practices tour of other innovators’ work.

Previously he co-founded one of the first multimedia textbook publishers (Digital Learning Interactive, sold in 2004 to Thomson Learning). Peter has written extensively about the strange and wonderful effects of computers on mainstream culture for many publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Salon, and the Village Voice. Some of his very favorite pieces include a profile of Norwegian programmers who used pigeons to transmit information between computers http://bit.ly/bXtkAi, the evangelism of Edward Tufte’s information design seminars http://bit.ly/cwPvvJ, and one of the earliest articles on Wikipedia http://bit.ly/aXq3Vj. He also did a tour of duty at O’Reilly Media, where he served five very happy years in the Missing Manual group, most recently as associate publisher.

Peter’s undergraduate degree is from Harvard, where he studied American history and literature, and he has an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives with his wife and daughter in “upstate Manhattan” (aka Washington Heights).