booktwo.org

I’ve been thinking about how to create RSS feeds and achievements for pBooks, almost an API. Here’s a quick, on-the-way-to-work scheme. Think Foamee. Bkkeeper monitors your twitter feed for @bkkeeper notes - just text an ISBN and ’start’, ‘end’ or a page number to your Twitter stream. On ’start’, bkkeeper adds that ISBN to your LibraryThing account and fills in the ’started on’ date. It continues to follow your progress as you read the book, then when it gets an ‘end’ message it fills in the ‘finished on’ date. Further enhancements could include blogging dog-eared pages - although limited to Twitter’s 140-char limit, less a 13-digit ISBN.

Should really finish another bkish project before trying this one, although the two would mesh quite nicely together, eh, Tom?

OK. Back to work.

Steve over at the Gilbane Publishing Practice Blog has a long post on the experiences of the the We Are Smarter Than Me project. We>Me, which I wrote about last year, is (was?) a project by MIT, Pearson and others to build a community to write a book about how building communities could help businesses. The results, as Gilbane tells it, are interesting.

Firstly, it became clear to the steering committee that they had to relinquish all control of the project to the community in order for the community to flourish. There can be no half-measures in crowd-sourcing: you either let people do exactly what they want, or they won’t do it. This was demanded by the users, and the original editorial board had no choice to go along with it. In the end, they realised that this did energise the project.

However, freeing up the community also meant that the final book was not acceptable on delivery: “To yield an acceptable business book, it would be necessary to hire an accomplished professional author who would also handle the fact checking process.” This is not that unexpected, but it is a problem - particularly if that editor has to negotiate edits with X hundred authors…

There are some other insights as well - not least that the originally intended participants, tenured professors at Wharton and MIT, refused to participate, and that this didn’t make any difference in the long run - that make the Gilbane report worth reading in full. But it’s interesting to compare too with the Million Penguins project, as the final reports on that make pretty much the same observation: the journey was more interesting than the destination. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a business book or a novel; for the participants, the act of creation is more important than the end result.

Is this, then, the central quality of the wikibook? Crowdwriting - or many-to-many publishing, as Gilbane puts it - is inherently selfish. It’s not in the individual author’s best interest to make their shard integrate well with others - in fact, the opposite may be true. Altruism exists, but it’s balanced with self-promotion, of one kind or another. But perhaps we should pick apart that phrase, ‘many-to-many publishing’ - something there resists the urge to put an end to the endeavour. Like Wikipedia, is a wikibook - by its very nature - permanently unfinished? One of the core perceived attributes of book 1.0 is that it represents the “one true version” - yet many of our most culturally important books - think of the Bible, or the works of Shakespeare - exist in multiple versions.

Perhaps, if we are to understand the wikibook, we need to place it in the context of mythical texts, like the Bible and other religious and historical works. They share the same core attributes: multiple authors, disputed authorship, multiple versions, endless potential versions, authors and versions distributed across time and space and filterable by the reader/editor’s prejudices. The only thing we can do is add metadata to aid historians, tracking changes and creating concordances.

With the need for a “one true version” removed, we promote the reader to editor, and the relationship graph becomes truly many-to-many, instead of passing through the editorial bottleneck. Combine this with innovative licensing which allows for-profit publication of remixed text (CC3.0 now available), and you have the seeds of a new literary culture…

Don’t you love it when you think of something really cool, but you don’t have the skills to make it happen - and then you find out someone already has?

Back in October of last year, I suggested a couple of the projects that I’d like to see Booktwo build. One of these was Exquisite Corpus, an updated take on the old parlour game, Exquisite Corpse, where players took it in turn to add to a drawing or story created by the previous player. Sadly, we never managed to implement this.

However, we were very pleased to stumble upon Yarn, a collaborative story-writing tool created by the folks at The Daily Jolt, a US College network (and is somewhat proprietary for that, but hey). Yarn allows people to start their own stories, or add to those created by others, and they can also splice off at any point from existing stories to create choose-your-own-adventure-type tales. Go have a play.

Yarn isn’t presented as a cutting-edge literary tool, but it has the potential to be one. The other project we suggested late last year was Infintie Entries, a distributed wiki-novel. This was fulfilled up to a point by Penguins’ Million Penguins project, but the latter failed - in as much as it became unmanageable and was eventually euthanised - because it tried to synthesise a single voice - one version of the truth - from a wealth of disparate voices. If the wiki- or massively-authored novel is to succeed, it needs to embrace dissonance and non-linearity, it needs to take the path mapped out by avant-garde writers like J. G. Ballard and William Burroughs. Yarn, cutesy though it is, provides one possible framework to make this happen.

One of the many things we missed while we were away was the appearance of Forbes Magazine’s special Books edition. It’s right on the ball, with a number of fascinating articles from the people who really know what they’re talking about, so you’ve got the Institute for the Future of the Book’s Ben Vershbow on The Networked Book, Boingboing’s Cory Doctorow on giving books away for free, and UC’s Jonathan Enfield on new challenges to copyright. It’s a really good selection, and all the commentators seem to be saying the same thing: technology is coming, but books aren’t going away.

Cory Doctorow’s piece is possibly the most interesting - not just from how assured he is of his model, which he has every right to be, having released three novels for free online, but because of his analysis of the link between social networking and the social book:

The thing about an e-book is that it’s a social object. It wants to be copied from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm device, pasted into a mailing list. It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom of e-mails. It is so fluid and intangible that it can spread itself over your whole life. Nothing sells books like a personal recommendation–when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we could hear were “My friend suggested I pick up….” The friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth.

If ebooks do take over (and, Doctorow believes, this is by no means certain), we’ve got to think of new ways to monetise them, because you just can’t charge for easy-copy bits like you can for physical paper. But creatives have wethered these kinds of changes before:

This isn’t the first time creative entrepreneurs have gone through one of these transitions. Vaudeville performers had to transition to radio, an abrupt shift from having perfect control over who could hear a performance (if they don’t buy a ticket, you throw them out) to no control whatsoever (any family whose 12-year-old could build a crystal set, the day’s equivalent of installing file-sharing software, could tune in). There were business models for radio, but predicting them a priori wasn’t easy. Who could have foreseen that radio’s great fortunes would be had through creating a blanket license, securing a Congressional consent decree, chartering a collecting society and inventing a new form of statistical mathematics to fund it?

This description of the e-shift is much like my humble own previously, comparing it to the move from chamber to recorded music. But the essential point here is that more readers must be, by definition, a good thing. It’s an honour to be pirated: it’s a sign of recognition. And,

There has never been a time when more people were reading more words by more authors. The Internet is a literary world of written words. What a fine thing that is for writers.

Back in the UK, Charles Leadbeater’s next book is available online for comment. We-think is less immersive than other network book projects, but it’s great that Profile, joint small publisher of the year, have allowed this to go ahead - most publishers shy away from releasing content free.

We-think is about the power of mass creativity, charting the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning. The website interface does not make dipping into the book very easy, sticking to a more linear style - there’s also a Wiki version - but it does make commenting on it very easy. We particularly like the fact that commentators seem to be line editing the book as well as commenting on its content. Oh, if people would that for my books.

We quite clearly can’t get enough of McKenzie Wark (not least because he just dropped by to tell us about an older network book project, Speed Factory), and he’s recently been interviewed at Creative Commons.

As well as quoting Laurence Sterne, always a good sign, he notes that Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (which we like almost as much as Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life) has been available for free online for years, but the print edition still sells well too. Giving away content for free is the great taboo of the publishing world (see Google Book Search &c.), but for those who’ve actually done it (Charles Stross’ Hugo-nominated Accelerando is a good example), it seems to give a boost.

The most important point from Wark’s interview, however, seems to be that it is not only technology which will take us to the next level. As well as the tools, we need “new cultural, social, and literary conventions. We need to relearn how to read and write.”

I was recently re-reading my Masters dissertation, a rather inept analysis of the abstract classification problem: how to computationally document and classify not only the content of, say, images but also their emotional appeal and resonance. The problem was, unbeknownst to me, being solved or at least massively advanced by ad hoc systems such as tagging and folksonomies even as I wrote it. However, much of the paper was also concerned with the encoding of stories: how narrative, and the conditions that are required to make such a thing not only logically consistent but interesting, can be recorded on a computer; how it is encoded in the human mind; and the potential equivalences and interfaces between the two.

Obliquely inspired by these musings, I’d like to propose booktwo.org’s first Projects. One is a variation of the Surrealist’s Exquisite Corpse parlour game, also known as Consequences, where the first player draws the head of a body and folds the paper over to conceal their work, the next the torso, and so on. The other, more general, I like to think of as akin to British experimental novelist B. S. Johnson’s novel The Unfortunates - a collection of bound chapters presented to the reader in a box, to be read in any order they preferred.

Both of these simple exercises provide possible models for the networked, or wiki, book - collaborative works that use the wisdom of crowds to create texts which surpass the knowledge of any individual contributor. Examples we have cited before include McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY and MIT’s We>Me, the former a massively-moderated work of analysis, the latter an edited, mass-authorship textbook. What I’d like to see created is the networked novel.

Plan One: Exquisite Corpus will present to the user the last few lines of an existing text, and an entry box. Only when they have added to the story as they see fit will they be able to view the text in its (temporary) entirety. Is this even possible? Can a coherent narrative develop from disparate strands? We shall see.

Plan Two: Infinite Entries will take the form of a Wiki, but unlike traditional information-bearing wikis this site will carry stories. On entrance, the visitor will be sent to one random entry containing a story, quote, or fragment, from which multiple linked paths extend. The possibilities are endless.

Comments? Thoughts? Suggestions? Please chip in. We’ll let you know as soon as the Projects are available for use…

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).