Michael Rueger is up, talking about Sophie - and the title of the post is their motto. They are wrking with "The Institute for the Future of the Book". It's hosted at USC, in Los Angeles.

So why a new model instead of something like a markup language or PDF? PDF is too close to print, HTML (etc) is like programming content. They want to make it easy to mix/remix content.Sophie is media agnostic - text, images, video, audio, etc.

All of the data is stored in XML format, and the formats are versioned. The rationale behind not using a binary format? They rot too quickly (try opening a binary file created by some editor back in 1980 today, for instance).

John McIntosh got up to cover the storage system they use: