We’ve talked much about what’s hap­pen­ing in pub­lish­ing, paper, and dig­i­tal cul­ture, but let’s talk about what should happen.

“Book Oven is cloud-publishing: we are an online toolset that enables indi­vid­u­als and groups to make, improve, pub­lish, and sell print books and ebooks. Book Oven is designed for inde­pen­dent writ­ers and small presses.”

Regard­less of what you think about Book Oven’s imple­men­ta­tion, they have the right idea. It is a community-centered net­work that pro­vides a plat­form for writ­ers to preen their work and eas­ily export it into for­mats for dig­i­tal and print-on-demand pub­lish­ing. This is a fan­tas­tic tool, but does not pro­vide any pipeline into tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing cir­cles. Enter Richard Eoin Nash’s start-up, Cur­sor:

The busi­ness will focus on devel­op­ing the value of the read­ing and writ­ing ecosys­tem, includ­ing the growth of mar­kets for estab­lished authors, as well as engag­ing read­ers and sup­port­ing emerg­ing writ­ers. Each com­mu­nity will have a pub­lish­ing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as dig­i­tal down­loads, con­ven­tional print and lim­ited arti­sanal editions—and will offer authors all the ben­e­fits of a dig­i­tal plat­form: faster time to mar­ket, faster account­ing cycles, faster pay­ments to authors. But the great­est oppor­tu­nity is in the com­mu­nity itself. Each will have tiers of mem­ber­ship, includ­ing paid mem­ber­ships that will offer exclu­sive access to tools and ser­vices, such as rich text edi­tors for mem­bers to upload their own writ­ing, peer-to-peer writ­ing groups, rec­om­men­da­tion engines, access to estab­lished authors online and in per­son, and edi­to­r­ial or mar­ket­ing assis­tance. Mem­bers can get both peer-based feed­back and pro­fes­sional feedback.

Now we are get­ting some­where. Richard could speak to this bet­ter, since the plat­form doesn’t exist yet, but from what I can glean this looks more like a tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing scheme that is tak­ing advan­tage social media. Do you catch the dif­fer­ence? Both ser­vices are try­ing to fig­ure out how to make a book hap­pen, but Book Oven seems to be ask­ing these ques­tion from a writer’s stand­point: can we cre­ate a ser­vice that helps writ­ers, edi­tors, and read­ers inter­act? Richard, how­ever, is ask­ing the ques­tion from a pub­lish­ing stand­point: how can we help you writ­ers pro­duce a good, viable prod­uct that peo­ple will buy? At least, that’s how I see it.

We should not, how­ever, neglect what Dave Gray is doing with unbooks, the book as soft­ware. If we view a book as some­thing always in process with a com­mu­nity cen­tered dis­cus­sion, then this would change how we would define the web plat­form. For instance:

  • The writer of the book ought to be able to track exactly who bought the book, so he can bring them into the dis­cus­sion (either pub­licly or pri­vately). This also gives the author greater power over his brand.
  • If we take the soft­ware metaphor seri­ously, then why can’t some­body pur­chase the book at any stage of devel­op­ment? Why not just sec­tions of a book? The power and use­ful­ness that could bring for the sale of tech­ni­cal man­u­als, for exam­ple, would be incredible.
  • And–to extend the metaphor to hardware–why not plug and play books? I cre­ate my own selec­tion of short sto­ries from a cat­a­log and make my own (through print-on-demand) col­lec­tion of sto­ries, or I am a col­lege pro­fes­sor who wants to select spe­cific chap­ters from spe­cific books to cre­ate my own text­book. The pos­si­bil­i­ties are limitless

The list could go on.

The one group, how­ever, that seems to have been neglected are book design­ers.* My ques­tion, as spin off from my lit­tle mantra, “In an age of increas­ing dig­i­ti­za­tion, objects become more valu­able”, is how can we make a com­mu­nity cen­tered plat­form that makes gor­geous books, elec­tronic or hard copy, as a focus? What will it take to make a book ver­sion of Ponoko and is that a viable busi­ness model?

*Nash actu­ally alludes to it in the quote above, “dig­i­tal down­loads, con­ven­tional print and lim­ited arti­sanal edi­tions”, but I sus­pect it is not his focus.