booktwo.org

Friday saw the launch of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, an organisation dedicated to understanding how to take advantage of “collective intelligence… new communication technologies - especially the Internet - [which] now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways.” One of their first projects is We Are Smarter Than Me, a collaborative effort by to write a “network book” - a book written by multiple authors, leveraging their experiences and intelligence to create a new kind of textbook (which, in this case, already has a publishing deal - Pearson, 2007). This is the kind of wiki book I conjectured in the founding article.

“Since the beginning of publishing, books have been written by individuals or by small groups of people (experts). This has even applied to recent books that describe the power of community intelligence. We Are Smarter Than Me will test this paradox, and determine whether a community of authors can write a compelling book better than individual experts.” - WeMe FAQ

WeMe neatly sidesteps the issue of author royalties by proposing a system in which all the authors, including those cut from the final edition, will be given an equal vote on the distribution of book royalties to charity, with the sweetener that “All contributors will be listed, in print, as authors. You’ll be able to take a copy of the book and show it to your friends, colleagues and family.” How lovely.

Such an approach would not be thought to encourage contributions according to the traditional publishing model, but WeMe is inspired first and foremost by Wikipedia, an enterprise which proves that people are far more willing to share information for the greater good than history, and copyright law, has supposed. They also cite Google as an inspiration - an organisation which has not been shy in making clear its legal ownership of all content stored on its servers, despite its “Don’t Be Evil” motto. But then Web 2.0, even more than 1.0, is all about trust.

The WeMe model is the next iteration of that explored by The Institute for the Future of the Book in their collaboration with author McKenzie Wark, GAM3R 7H30RY, a website that will one day be a book - once a community of readers have given their two cents on the posted draft. This is the dream of most publishers: full audience feedback before the book hits the market (and you can bet every one of those who comment will be buying the book, an attempt to formulate a critical theory of computer games, once it hits the shelves).

I recently went exploring in Second Life, and it didn’t take long to find bibliophiles. Over at the Coelacanth Books & News Store in Changmi, I met the proprietor Coelacanth Seurat (pictured, in front of her store, below), who is exploring the possibilities of text in the 3D virtual world. The store stocks Second Life-themed magazines, which are distributed via notecards (the texts of SL), SL-authored books, and a monthly selection of recommended books with links to buy them from Amazon.

Seurat sees her mission thus:

“In RL a bookstore is a place to browse and buy books & magazines. But in SL I think the definition has to be expanded a bit: compensating authors as they desire, but focusing on aggregating SL text-based content and providing a portal to information on books in general. This bookstore is an ongoing “thought experiment,” and I welcome all comments.”

A different approach is taken at the virtual (although unaffiliated) branch of Shakespeare & Company, over in Mill Pond (thanks to owner Micala Lumiere for the link). In homage to the original on Paris’ Left Bank, Grace McDunnough hosts weekly poetry readings on an agreed theme - poets can read aloud, or circulate their works via notecard.

Such an approach is one more easily comprehended by authors and publishers: a virtual meeting space for book groups, discussions and author appearances (I’d be particularly interested in hearing about any SL Book Groups). Just as several bands have made live appearances in SL (the evergreen Duran Duran and U2 among them), so authors have started to give talks too - unsurprisingly, Wired editor Chris Anderson was among the first, discussing his widely-read future commerce tome, The Long Tail.

Books themselves are making an appearance too. Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher at Penguin UK (and known inworld as Jeremy Neumann), was kind enough to give me a couple. The first, a reading copy of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, appears as an object clutched in your avatar’s hand, and is certainly legible, even if the experience is disconcertingly like reading over one’s own shoulder (see below).

Penguin’s own effort, a sampler for Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the book credited with inspiring Second Life itself and so understandably popular with residents, is more successful - although slow to load, it appears full-screen and, on a large enough monitor, much better simulates the actual experience of reading (again, below).

None of these are available outside Second Life however, and the real goal for publishers must be to sell real-world books (and ebooks) through Second Life frontages - something no one has yet figured out how to do. The long-awaited arrival of HTML inworld looks like it will rectify this, however, and there are certainly plenty waiting for the opportunity. In the meantime, there’s plenty of publicity to be gained, something the book industry, at least, rarely wants to miss.

Following widespread hoots of derision from the publishing industry, guess what? From the Bookseller:

“Overwhelming demand” for the new e-reader from Sony means that the device has sold out online. Priced at US$349.99, the ebook reader was launched on 27th September and sold out shortly afterwards.

Sony states on its website that “due to overwhelming demand, new orders may ship as late as November 30th”. Sony would not disclose manufacturing quantities or sales volumes for the product.

While much of this is undoubtedly down to early adopters who want to try out the device, not people with a genuine urge to make the switch from paper books, it’s hard to ignore, particularly with the high introductory price of $349.99, which many critics suggested would sink Sony’s plans.

While we haven’t had a chance to try out the Reader yet - for now obvious reasons - we have had a play with its predecessor, the Japanese LIBRIé, which uses the same e-ink technology, and were pleasantly surprised. Easy to read, even in harsh sunlight, pretty light and robust enough to shove in a handbag, it seemed an excellent first step down an obvious path (for product images, see the photostream: Reader and LIBRé). The Reader is the result of much feedback on the first device - and it opens on the right, in the opposite direction to the Japanese version which, reading right to left, confused a lot of people I showed it to at Frankfurt…

Coupled with Sony’s launch of the CONNECT ebooks store, and the ability to display PDFs, web content and play mp3s, this is undoubtedly the first serious electronic book on the market. We can be sure there will be plenty more to come.

Last week, The Industry Measure, an American trendwatcher, released part one of its report series The Multichannel Mix: The Role of Print, Web, Wireless, and Other Platforms in Today’s New Media Environment, focussed on publishing (Available online here, summarised here).

The report, which I can’t possibly afford, does note that “in Summer 2006, 26% of all publishers cited “competition from online/Internet formats” as a business challenge, the highest this challenge has been in a decade.” There’s a slight wording change there from publishers’ usual characterisation of such competition as a ‘threat’ rather than a ‘challenge’, but it’s still pretty obvious how publishers feel about the approaching changes in the industry. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to ignore the remaining 74% who don’t feel it’s a challenge, who anyway, unless they have some excellent plans already in place, are likely to go under fairly soon.

The ‘threat’ of digital formats has been at a low hum at publishing conferences for a while now, and you have to wonder what it felt like at music industry dos when ‘the whole mp3 thing’ started to sink in. Of course, the radical difference between then and now is that while mp3 snuck up and bit the music industry on the arse, publishers have been sitting on a number of perfectly good formats for eBooks for some time - and you can’t say they haven’t been warned. When CDs turned up, music publishers of vinyl and casette didn’t break down and cry - they just went and bought CD burners. Likewise, after a lot of initial panic, lawsuits and dire warnings, the music industry is still in full fig post-Napster, Limewire, Bittorrent and the iTunes Music Store. In fact, there’s plenty of data to suggest digital distribution has re-invigorated an industry that was in thrall to radio and TV airplay - much as today’s publishing industry still relies on a small number of influential critics and journals to get the word out about their product.

What this means, of course, is that publishing is going to do just fine in the digital future. But it really needs to put more time into ebooks and related formats, explore new distribution channels, and start considering some of those little challenges as whopping great opportunities.

Today´s Guardian carries a prominent article from non-specialist correspondent Stuart Jeffries on the subject of Second Life. (You only live twice), continuing the virtual environment´s increasing visibility as the next online phenomena to move into the popular conciousness, hot on the heels of myspace, YouTube, et al.

This follows the announcement last week from Penguin´s ´Digital Publisher´ Jeremy Ettinghausen of their move into SL, initially offering a ´virtual sampler´of Neal Stephenson´s cyberpunk classic Snow Crash, the book credited with inspiring the creation of SL (and incidentally a personal favourite, although you must read his non-cyber debut, the eco-thriller Zodiac, too). Ettinghausen also mentions the upcoming introduction of the Penguin Virtual Bookshelf, “which will allow residents of Second Life to decorate their virtual homes with working samples of real books.”

There appear to be a lot of half-measures in that sentence - the use of books for decorative purposes strikes a chill note in any true bibliophile´s heart (”Will the bindings match my drapes?” as the old bookseller´s horror story goes), as does the phrase “working samples”. It will be interesting to see what form these books take - will they be fully-fledged ebooks, available for complete download, or merely promotional fluff to drive SLers to the nearest bricks-and-mortar bookseller? Nevertheless, it´s refreshing stuff.

As the offline buzz around SL increases, we can expect to see more of this, driven, it can be certain, more by newcomers to the islands than by the early adopters, who by and large are a highly creative community unlikely to be push-overs for the first marketing schemes targeted at them, in what they rightfully consider to be their space. But if Penguin lauch a serious attempt to reach SL residents, they are likely to find many booklovers among the SL demographic.

I’ve yet to visit the virtual Shakespeare & Co., an SL Bookstore on Mill Pond, but would love to hear from those who have, or know of similar ventures within SL. This Shakespere & Co. (as opposed to the legendary offline version) is run by “Grace McDunnough”, aka Rhonda Lowry, Vice President and Executive in Residence at Turner Broadcasting New Products Group, responsible for “new media and entertainment - particularly the influence of advanced computing and virtual worlds as new media and entertainment platforms.” This appears symptomatic of businesses being driven into SL and other online ventures by the personal obsessions of their own employees.

Publishers aside, it will also be interesting to see the literature that arises from such communities as Second Life. Many books have already been written about online communities from the early days to the present - Village Voice writer Julian Dibbell´s My Tiny Life springs to mind - but the possibilities include texts created entirely within and for such worlds. Divorced from such dull constraints as physicality, what would a book look like in a truly expansive Second Life? And what stories would it tell?

The latest New York Review of Books, a special edition of which is produced for the book fair, carries an article by Jason Epstein, venerable founder of the NYRB and husband of crusading refusenik Judith Miller, entitled Books@Google (it´s also available online). A flavour of Epstein´s wonderful prose can be found in the following analysis of Google´s ´Don´t Be Evil´ motto:

The confrontation of founders who wish to do only good with the complex reality of their astonishing commercial achievement is an issue of biblical scope which calls to mind the expulsion, naked and trembling, of our ancestral parents from prelapsarian Eden into a world where choice is obligatory and error inevitable, a blessing and a burden upon themselves and what Milton called, with mixed feelings, their hapless seed.

The meat of the article, however, is not Google itself, but the possibilities of future book distribution. While Epstein sees the democratisation of knowledge as a good thing, and writes without the horror that Google Book Search evinces from other commentators, he also seems to be in no doubt that the future of the book remains rosy.

Epstein envisages a future where books will be stored digitally and available worldwide, but printed on demand from ATM-type machines at the point of need. He´s putting his money where his mouth is too, founding a company called, imaginatively, Books On Demand, which has already installed such a machine in the World Bank bookstore in Washington, D.C., with others due to come online soon in the New York Public Library and the Alexandrina Library in Egypt - the latter printing books in Arabic.

This is an exciting proposition, and refreshing from someone so bound up with the old school of publishing. Nevertheless, Epstein´s assertion that “Until human beings themselves evolve as electronic receivers”, consumers will prefer their reading matter to come in a format “indistinguishable from factory-made books, to be read as books have been read for centuries” seems short-sighted. It is a strange logic that assumes, all things being equal, that readers will prefer hunks of dead tree to a lighter, more flexible but otherwise indistinguishable electronic version - and that version is coming.

Today´s Guardian ran a large picture on page six of mass-market paperbacks being laid out in Frankfurt, under the headline ´Cover Story´and bearing the strapline:

The 380,000 books displayed on stands at Frankfurt Book Fair has helped offset fears about the viability of print in the digital age.

Wishful thinking. I’m in Frankfurt this week too, for what is by far the largest and most prestigious gathering of the publishing world, and no one seems to be taking the future seriously. The facilities provided pay ample testament to this, and would shock those used to attending more modern get-togethers. Wi-fi access is conspicuous by its absence, the few computers visible being used largely for slide presentations or demos of proprietary content management systems. More on this soon.

As to public internet access, the few ´Net-c@fe´s provided consist of stand-up booths running starlingly intransigent versions of IE5 which are inadequent for running the most common webmail apps, with any kind of dynamic content blocked by uncomprehending software. In international hall 8.0, home to all the visiting English-speaking publishers, there are ten booths hidden up a flight of stairs next to the toilets. In all, Frankfurt provides perhaps 50 such points for over 200,000 visitors and 7,000 exhibitors.

Welcome to the book world.

Welcome to booktwo.org. This site was inspired by the following piece of writing first posted at shorttermmemoryloss.com. This should give you some idea of where booktwo came from, and where it’s supposed to be going.

There’s been a bit of a creative block in these parts for a while. Half-formed thoughts. Unfinished articles. Sweaty, 5am thinking jags. Please ignore the elephant in the corner. He’s not really there. La la la la la.

The book is going to die. It’s over. Five, ten years. No more books. And we really, really need to start talking about this. We need to put in place structures for coping with this. For ensuring that authors survive, that our stories survive. I’m really not kidding.

All the publishers have absolutely no idea what is about to happen. They’re worried about Google Book Search, for Christ’s sake. Google Book Search is for indexing academic books, for redistributing academic information that’s needlessly locked up in physical locations, and whose freeing up will launch humanity on its next great evolutionary leap. Woohoo. Side effect: no more royalties for authors. No more fat advances. No more lunch money.

Also, in the mid-term, we’re going to see publishers die even before the book does. Hey HarperCollins, what does POD stand for? Random House, can you say Lulu? One of you guys, buy a POD Printer now, please, before it gets embarrassing. Invest in some tech. Start paying attention. Because one day you are going to wake up, Amazon is printing books, and you are out of a job. Oh, look: BookSurge.

We are a couple of years - quite possibly less - away from an eReader that looks like a book. It’s been so long coming we forgot it was about to happen. This whole I’ve-got-the-first-edition thing is really sweet, but do you actually use CDs any more? (Note: if you do, you’re really going to have trouble with the next bit.)

I was talking to someone about this the other day, trying to figure out where all that information now written down in books is going to go, how it will continue to present itself to us. I realised that this isn’t like the move from vinyl to CD, or CD to MP3, although it will initially appear as the latter. It’s the difference between chamber music and the gramophone, between the illuminated manuscript and the paperback. The book as we think of it now has really only been around since the 1930s, since Allen Lane. They’re not as permanent as we’d like to think. Books are about to go back to being written by monks, and the rest of us are going to have to find another way to read. A historical window is about to close.

I don’t know what I’m worried about, really. Well, the dole office. But aside from that. Should anyone apart from publishers be worried about this? You’ll keep getting stories to read. Authors will keep on writing. They won’t get paid much, but hey, they never did. In fact, there’s a chance they’ll get paid more, if they’re smart, but probably not.

We brought this on ourselves, to a large extent. For all our bleating, we’ve been substandard for a while. Cheap paperback editions, with glue that lets all the pages fall out after five years. A total disregard for quality, editorial or otherwise. A craven, backslapping literary culture. Oh well. Bye bye.

Is the format important? Will stories written for a screen rather than a page - even screens that look like pages - differ that much? There’s something bizarre and incredibly nineteenth century in the development of eReaders, a kind of cultural redundancy. We just need to get them to look enough like books in order to kill books, then they’ll look like something else. It’s just a design issue.

It’s 6am. I’m writing this on a computer. Later, I’m going to format it in XHTML and put it out on the internet for people to read. You probably don’t know me, and you probably don’t care. Salman Rushdie is going to really hate this next bit, almost as much as his publishers, but you’re not. Readers will be fine. Take hope in that.

I just want to smooth the transition. Make sure there are enough smart people in the right places so that we don’t lose too much on the way through. There’s enough of them on the web - we should be looking to the W3C, to web standards, to information technologists and engineers, to people who’ve been thinking about this for twenty years. You know, smart people. Not the ones thinking about in at quarter past six on a Monday morning. In bed.

Oh, it’s going to be fun. I’m looking forward to the first really good, genuinely collaborative novel, wiki-style. Chapters written by people on different continents, subplots by experts in their field. Proper editing. I can’t wait to be able to go travelling with five hundred stories on my eReader/iBook/USB SuperDonglePage thing, because I always take Moby Dick and I never read it. The best bit? Readers are going to decide what they’d like to read, not idiots in industry offices, or on lilac sofas. The first MySpace author phenomenon should be about next week. Please, God.

It’s the Frankfurt Book Fair in two weeks time. This should be funny. There’s going to be a man there who publishes books exclusively about angels. Who thinks he actually is an angel, or something. Everybody thinks he’s mad. In ten years time, he’s probably going to be the only one still in business. The angel people will still buy books. No one else will.

We’re going to start thinking about this. A lot. We have no idea what is going to happen, but, just like everybody else, we’d been quietly enjoying this whole internet thing, while pretending to ourselves that it was not going to completely destroy everything we were currently working on. Five years ago, I was studying Computer Science. I got a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence, and then went to work in dead tree publishing. I am an idiot. And, looking around, I’m not the only one. But I know what I’m talking about.

Don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. We’re going to see this through. Because we love stories, and we love great writers, and we just need to start separating that concept from your actual, paper books. Good morning. Hello. Wake up now.