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.