Lone Gunman

Rus­sell Davies on what’s been per­co­lat­ing in dig­i­tal cul­ture regard­ing print media:

It’s not news that the inter­net has stim­u­lated all sorts of cre­ativ­ity in the real world. From com­mu­ni­ties and mar­ket­places of crafters like folksy to new forms of per­sonal man­u­fac­ture like shape­ways; tech­nol­ogy is giv­ing reg­u­lar peo­ple access to tools and mar­kets that once they couldn’t reach. And these aren’t nec­es­sar­ily new tools or tech­nolo­gies. It’s just that sud­denly masses of peo­ple get to use them where once it was only large organ­i­sa­tions that could. And the exam­ple I wanted to focus on was paper. (It was for The Guardian Media Group after all).

Tim O’Reilly has a great idea about the power of Watch­ing The Alpha Geeks. And if you did that now, you’d notice that an inter­est­ing sub­set of alpha geeks are get­ting all excited about books and paper. You only have to look at Book­Camp this week­end. And its atten­dant Paper­Camp.

Later in the arti­cle, he men­tions Dave Gray’s book Marks and Mean­ing. Well, actu­ally, Dave’s pre­ferred nomen­cla­ture is “unbook” since the dis­tri­b­u­tion model and edi­tions are untraditional. Here is his descrip­tion reprinted in full:

A tra­di­tional book is released in edi­tions. When a work is revised or updated, a new edi­tion is released. These revised or updated edi­tions usu­ally offer small, incre­men­tal changes, such as a new pref­ace or intro­duc­tion, a new chap­ter, or small changes to the content.

An unbook is more like software:

1. An unbook is never fin­ished, but rather con­tin­u­ally updated, based on feed­back from users and their evolv­ing needs.

2. An unbook is released in ver­sions. As in open source soft­ware, ver­sion 1.0 of anunbook is a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone, indi­cat­ing that it is sta­ble and reli­able enough for use by the gen­eral pub­lic. The sig­nif­i­cance of a new release is indi­cated by the size of the gap: For exam­ple, the dif­fer­ence between 1.1 and 1.1.3 is minor, while the dif­fer­ence between 1.1 and 2.0 is major.

3. An unbook is sup­ported by a com­mu­nity of users who share their expe­ri­ences and best prac­tices with each other, and help each other trou­bleshoot prob­lems encoun­tered in their prac­tice areas. An unbook’s com­mu­nity is a very real part of the unbook’s devel­op­ment team.

An unbook is mind­ware: soft­ware for the mind.

I repeat: In an age of increas­ing dig­i­ti­za­tion, objects become more valu­able. And dig­i­ti­za­tion not only increases value, but changes the way we think about objects and, con­se­quently, how we dis­trib­ute them. We’ll talk about that more tomorrow.

In an age of increas­ing dig­i­ti­za­tion, objects become more valu­able. And that value is the rea­son print media will not die, even if it does shrink. My pre­dic­tion for print media, there­fore, is two-fold: you will see small run, local edi­tions of hard­bound books and quick, cheap paper­backs. Cou­ple this with our new atti­tudes on the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of con­tent online and you are going to find quite a num­ber of peo­ple self-publishing books. In fact, there are num­ber of folks doing inter­est­ing things already:

Snark­mar­ket, ear­lier this year, pub­lished 200 paper­backs of New Lib­eral Arts which drew from a num­ber of dif­fer­ent thinkers online:

It’s 2009. A gen­er­a­tion of dig­i­tal natives is careen­ing towards col­lege. The econ­omy is reboot­ing itself weekly. We have new respon­si­bil­i­ties now—as employ­ees, cit­i­zens, and friends—and we have new capa­bil­i­ties, too. The new lib­eral arts equip us for a world like this. But… what are they?

The best part about their self-publishing model is that after the 200 paper­backs were sold, the released the pdf for free.

Now, in light of that suc­cess, Robin Sloan has raised money through Kick­starter to write his lat­est novel:

The basic setup is: Imag­ine a Sher­lock Holmes for the 21st cen­tury. All the­re­ally good cases are on the inter­net. And Holmes is a woman, and Wat­son is an A.I., and San Fran­cisco… oh, poor San Francisco…

Why are these ven­tures impor­tant? Well, with the cost of print small runs is com­ing down, you are going to see more inter­est­ing thinkers out­side the tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing cir­cles writ­ing and sell­ing books online. And you will find self-publishing will be increas­ingly legit­imized* because as Diana Kim­ball noted about Robin Sloan’s cur­rent project:

Kick­starter forces pro­mo­tion, plan­ning, and urgency to the begin­ning, right when affir­ma­tion is most pre­cious. By cre­at­ing a pub­lic con­tract, Kick­starter takes the van­ity out of self-publishing. It’s not you pub­lish­ing it, not really; it’s all the peo­ple who trusted in your work enough to bet on its success.

“The money” Robin con­fided, “is noth­ing, com­pared to just knowing.”

*This makes me won­der whether or not this would mean a de-legitimization of the more tra­di­tional model.

You’ll hear more about social pub­lish­ing from me in the future, but this is too fresh to hes­i­tate show­ing you. Richard Eoin Nash, for­mer pub­lisher of Soft Skull press, has been try­ing to rally inter­est for a social pub­lish­ing start-up called Cur­sor.

In this inter­view, he defines “social publishing”:

1) Define “social pub­lish­ing” in terms the aver­age book reader would under­stand; no buzz­words, no “organic gur­gle of cul­ture”. What is it, and what’s in it for the reader?

For the reader-as-reader, what “social” means is that there’s going to be more infor­ma­tion about books, more scope to inter­act with the books (your own com­ment­ing & anno­tat­ing and read­ing oth­ers’), more scope to inter­act with the author, more scope to inter­act with one another. (This lat­ter item, to get semi-techy for a sec, is some­thing that the broad hor­i­zon­tal book social networks—Goodreads, Library­Thing, Shelfari—do well, though, so we’re likely to focus on using their APIs rather than ask­ing peo­ple to build their own book­shelves anew.)

“Social” is tak­ing the book and mak­ing it much eas­ier to have a con­ver­sa­tion with the book and its writer, and have con­ver­sa­tions around the book and its writer.

Again, more on this later.

To make a very long story short, I was a book lug­ging Lud­dite until about three years ago when I dis­cov­ered that the inter­net was more than cats fiend­ing after cheese­burg­ers. And, since then, I have become increas­ingly fas­ci­nated with dig­i­tal culture’s scrolls and more than a lit­tle con­cerned about my friend, the codex. Over the next few days, I plan on giv­ing you a rough lay of land in the new/old pub­lish­ing world accord­ing to my eye.

Caveat: I am not an expert in the field. I have never worked in it, but I have loved books in the past, known more than my fair share of authors and edi­tors, and spent many of my wak­ing hours think­ing about the shift in read­ing habits and whether it does, indeed, demand com­par­isons with Gutenburg’s rev­o­lu­tion.

We’ll start with a long, but inter­est­ing* essay by a for­mer Editor-in-Chief of Ran­dom House, Daniel Menaker, on the con­tem­po­rary pub­lish­ing industry:

And here is the list of mostly non-arithmetical obser­va­tions about main­stream pub­lish­ing that these occa­sions have led me to com­pile. It is writ­ten pri­mar­ily from the point of view of a medium– or senior-level acqui­si­tions edi­tor at a major trade house in New York City, the cen­ter of the pub­lish­ing world. It applies prin­ci­pally to the pub­li­ca­tion of orig­i­nal hard­cover books. Some of these obser­va­tions have been observed before, but I hope to refresh them here. Some will be less famil­iar, I hope. These ideas are drawn from pub­lish­ing as it stands — maybe I should say “stum­bles” –right now; many of them may well not obtain when electronic-book-text dig­i­ti­za­tion begins in earnest. That will hap­pen in a finan­cially and orga­ni­za­tion­ally seis­mic way very quickly, I think — over the next decade –but I believe that this impend­ing Gutenberg-level shift in read­ing cul­ture, along with the eco­nomic dis­as­ters of the last two years, ren­der the chal­lenges of present-day hard-copy pub­lish­ing all the more ago­niz­ing, imme­di­ate, and dra­matic. At least in the abstract, and espe­cially in this eco­nomic cli­mate, most other pro­fes­sions pose some of the same prob­lems for those who pur­sue them, no doubt. But the tec­ton­i­cally oppos­ing demands on pub­lish­ing — that it simul­ta­ne­ously make money and serve the tra­di­tion of lit­er­a­ture — and its highly unpre­dictable out­comes and its promi­nence in the atten­tion of the media have made it a kind of poster adult for cap­i­tal­ism and the arts in crisis.

For the most part, I have to say I’m glad to have left this all behind, except in the tran­quil­ity of rec­ol­lec­tion. But since pub­lish­ing is essen­tially a casino, I do miss the thrill of gam­bling and the rare win­ning throw of the dice.

*I write ‘inter­est­ing’, of course, because I plan on post­ing bor­ing articles later.

Still away this week, and with my return flight date fast approach­ing, I have one final guest author wait­ing in the wings to enter­tain you.

For the com­ing few days you will be treated to the mus­ings of Andrew Simone.

Andrew is a thought­ful and amus­ing chap who writes over at the fan­tas­tic group blog clus­ter­flock (Andrew’s posts here) and Anti-Expertism, his per­sonal blog.

Of course, Andrew is also on Twit­ter and you can fol­low his micro-musings here.