With Ben Vershbow and Jesse Wilbur of the Institute for the Future of the Book
LISTEN TO THE NETWORKED BOOK INTERVIEW WITH BEN VERSHBOW AND JESSE WILBUR HERE
READ THE SHOW NOTES FOR THIS INTERVIEW HERE
WS: This is Paula B. Here’s a question for you: is a book a thing or a place? If you said a thing, get ready for a big change. The networked book is here: the new agora/plaza/forum where author, publisher, and readers congregate to ponder, discuss, joke, enjoy, and refer. The book is now searchable, linkable, multimedia-able, commentable, annotatable, previewable, mutable, divisible, aggregatable, correlatable, syndicatable, feedable, emailable, Flickrable, deli.cio.us-able, Diggable. In fact, the book is on the brink of such a huge transformation that we wouldn’t be surprised if it opened its own chain of coffee bars.
Curious as we could be, The Writing Show caught up with two fellows of the Institute for the Future of the Book–Ben Vershbow and Jesse Wilbur–to find out how they are experimenting with this fascinating idea.
Welcome to The Writing Show, where writing is always the story. I’m your host, Paula B.
Today my guests are Ben Vershbow and Jesse Wilbur of the Institute for the Future of the Book.
Ben Vershbow has been a writer, researcher and publisher at the Institute for the Future of the Book since its founding in 2004. In addition to being a frequent contributor to the Institute’s blog, if:book, Ben has written on publishing and digital-age communication for Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal. He studied theater at Yale, graduating in 2002.
Jesse Wilbur received his masters degree in information science from UNC Chapel Hill, where he studied information architecture, user interface design, and digital libraries. He is interested in Sophie–a digital authoring experience–graphic design, and emergent phenomena. At the Institute for the Future of the Book he designs tools and Web and software interfaces for projects like GAM3R 7H30RY. He lives in Brooklyn where he is surrounded by new construction.
Welcome to The Writing Show, both of you. It is such a pleasure to have you here.
BV: Thank you very much.
JW: Thank you. Glad to be here.
BV: My name is Ben Vershbow. I’ve been with the Institute since we were founded almost two years ago.
JW: My name is Jesse Wilbur. I’ve been at the Institute for about six months, and Gamer Theory has been one of the projects I’ve been working on the entire time I’ve been here.
WS: What is a networked book?
BV: A networked book is sort of a large multi-faceted idea. Very simply, it’s the situation of the book in a networked environment and all the things that kind of flow from there, all the sort of changes that [situation] facilitates and spurs. A networked book has multiple possible dimensions. Most obviously it’s a hypertextual kind of book. It has linkages within it, and linkages leading out and leading in in the larger network.
A networked book is social. It incorporates feedback mechanisms and discussion platforms in its overall structure. It has the possibility of being distributed in its composition rather than being a discrete media object, which is the way we’re used to thinking about books or really any kind of media. It could be more a frame placed around various remote assets that could be on disparate servers. And I think maybe most importantly, a networked book is organic and is more about process than product. It’s always evolving over time and being impacted and changed by the various interactions going through it, the various revisions that it’s going through, and various annotations that readers and other authors and other nodes in the network are adding to it.
So something could be a networked book if it had just a couple of these aspects. But these are, I’d say, the big areas of the idea. But of course, it begs the question “What is a book?” and at what point does calling something a book become meaningless or no longer useful. We’ve been talking about that a lot, and I think some basic inherent qualities that make something [a networked book] is simply that it has boundaries, even though in the case of a networked book, those boundaries are highly porous. Boundaries that are meaningful. You could say that the Internet is a vast book, but I think the boundaries in that case are not as meaningful. They’re more the boundaries of the universe, the kind of boundaries that if you even try to think about them make your head hurt. So boundaries that are useful and actually exert pressures that cause things to happen in ways that they wouldn’t happen within other boundaries.
And it’s reader driven. A reader can access it in multiple ways. They can control the time register in which they’re engaging. These are basic kind of core attributes of something book-like that we are trying to hold onto and focus on as we try to use the book as an…it’s almost a metaphorical vessel to explore a lot of, a huge number of unknowns.
WS: Maybe it would be instructive to look at an example or two to look at some of these definitions that you just mentioned and see how they work within an example. So maybe if you could just talk about one or two networked books that you know of.
JW: Well, obviously Gamer Theory is one of our experiments that’s trying to instantiate a networked book, and it provides us with a lot of these boundaries that Ben was talking about, especially in terms of just having a core of content that is relatively stable and then having additional information added to it by other readers–and also some sort of functionality added to the entire project as time goes on. But say we take that in comparison to something like Wikipedia. Wikipedia obviously has all of the content generated by a number of people, as opposed to Gamer Theory, which has this different idea, this core of content which was written by McKenzie Wark. And then all of the rest of the stuff around it is commentary. The commentary definitely has value. It definitely is on some level as important as the core text. And in Wikipedia there’s also commentary. There’s the discussion about what goes into an actual article page. So there’s a little bit of analogy between the two of them. But I think that Gamer Theory is maybe in some sense a little bit more familiar form of networked book because we have a single author who wrote this text, and he’s collecting comments on it and revising his text in the future, whereas Wikipedia is maybe a step further on in a different direction in terms of overall collaboration.
BV: And Wikipedia is book-like…some ways that Wikipedia is book-like are slightly deceptive. We’re more inclined to call Wikipedia, think of Wikipedia, as some kind of new kind of book simply because it’s riffing on an established genre, an old kind of book–the encyclopedia—and that it’s predominantly textual. We think of books as predominantly textual, although I think one thing that’s going to be happening is there’s going to be increasing interplay–and already is–of multiple media forms within things that are book-like. So we’re more inclined to call Wikipedia a book than, say, something like MySpace or Flickr. But [with] Gamer Theory, there’s a lot of things that catch people offguard, a lot of things that are disorienting and unnerving or surprisingly wonderful. But it does look like some kind of book. It is pretty clear that we’ve taken something that could be fairly traditional, a traditionally structured and published book, and done something new with it. So the lineage there is more obvious. And once we get into areas like Wikipedia, the questions in some ways become…the stakes get higher, the questions get bigger. But we risk this little rickety vessel of [?], “the book” kind of falling apart and us being in some kind of new, adrift in some new territory.
WS: Can you just explain a little more about Gamer Theory? What does it look like to the reader?
JW: Gamer Theory looks like…well, it’s got a specific design based on the way that McKenzie Wark wrote the book. He wrote the book in small paragraphs of 250 words or less, 25 paragraphs per chapter, which allowed us to take something sort of like an overlaying card, a bunch of playing cards overlaid on top of each other, and putting text on that. So the interface is a little bit different than you would normally get in, let’s say, a blog or a traditional Web site that uses scrolling to allow you to navigate through the additional content. In this case, you get to click on the different cards to bring up the paragraph, and at the same time it brings up the commentary that’s associated with that card. And I think that’s in some ways the most profound design innovation of the site, that we’re using blogging software to mount this book. It’s a highly customized Wordpress. But generally in blogs and things like blogs, comments flow beneath in a kind of subordinate position to a parent post and often aren’t even there on the initial page, or there’s a link: “See comments” and a number next to it. You click on it and it flows beneath and the conversation has perhaps been initiated by the post. But by putting the comments directly alongside it, and in fact suggesting to the reader that this page is not complete unless you have participated in it in some way, unless you have responded, we think is a pretty interesting shake-up of the traditional hierarchies of reader and author. There’s much more of a collaborative relationship we’re trying to foster here between reader and author. But at the same time, the roles of reader and author are emphasized and strengthened and buttressed. It’s clear who the author is, and it’s clear that he has ultimate authority, in this case over this text. But by inviting more activated and more critically engaged readers into the process of developing, or at least discussing the development of the text, it’s in some ways elevating the reader and really implying that the author may have something to learn from it, which I think is often the case.
WS: What will happen to those comments when the book is published in physical form?
JW: McKenzie Wark has decided that he would like to include some of the comments, some of the ones that he feels illuminate his text in the best way, but he’s doing it by asking for permission. Just trying to avoid any hint of copyright infringement or anything like that even though they are obviously contributing their words to his text and the particular license that we have, which is a Creative Commons license.
BV: He’s also just a very well-mannered Australian gentleman, and I think he’s just polite and that’s how he would like it to be handled.
JW: So eventually what’s going to happen is that some of the comments will make it into the text, and some of the comments will just inform the way that he revises the text. And in all cases, I think the discussion has been helpful to him in terms of what he’s going to do as he goes forward with the revision of his book before he publishes it.
BV: And this really brings up a lot of questions about what is the role of the editor and what kind of new responsibilities and tasks are set before the author when they choose to work in this way, in this kind of open access kind of workshopping way. What comments do you choose to include and how do you actually arrange them in the final text? A concrete example, but an ancient one, of a networked book would be the Talmud, which is a huge compendium of exigesis and scriptural commentary and law in the Jewish tradition. It’s an amazing thing to look at in terms of thinking about networked books because each page of the Talmud is a map of time. You have core text and then commentaries arranged around it, and the placement of those commentaries depends on the stature of that respondent, of that scholar when they commented, when their scholarship was being enacted on these texts. It’s an amazing feat of editorial selection and redaction. And then some people might argue with it or contest it, but the ways that they found to array these different commentaries on a single static page is quite astonishing. And in some ways we have not figured out how to even match that in the electronic environment, which you would think much more flexible and much more dynamic.
So what we’re doing with Gamer Theory, in the grand scale a very modest experiment, we’re suggesting how we might have these kinds of layered documents and how the discussion over time around these documents really is relevant to them as a cohesive work. But of course, if there’s a lot of discussion, you have to make editorial choices because if you just have a vast mass of muck, it’s not going to be readable. So these are questions that we were intending, and I think we have, provoked in mounting this experiment.
WS: What will happen to the comments after the book is published in hardcopy? Will they continue on the Web? I mean obviously once it’s on paper you can’t add to that edition. Well, I suppose maybe you could revise it, but….What are your plans for that? Are you just taking a “wait and see” attitude?
JW: Yeah, initially we intended to have Gamer Theory run for nine weeks only. It was going to be a very short-lived Web site. That changed through some technical changes we made, but also just as we saw the sort of pace of response and the way that we can foresee it growing, it doesn’t make sense to leave it up for that short amount of time. We need to let it live its life and have a little bit more time up there. So whether or not it overlaps with the print edition is something that we don’t know yet, whether whoever publishes this book will eventually take it down or ask us to take it down. But until then I think we’re just going to continue to let it live and hopefully it will have a parallel life to the printed edition.
BV: Of course, another question in these kinds of networked writing processes–this is something first and foremost that the author has to figure out, but also the editor and publishers—at what point do you stop? At what point do you say we’re done with this phase and now I’m ready to go to another phase? In some cases you may say we never stop, like this is here, and it’s supposed to be continuous evolution. I have a feeling in McKenzie’s case that this is going to go on for a while. I don’t know how long. And then he’ll say, “Okay, this is useful. Now I’m going to sort of rework this.” And we may at that point close comments on this version and then open up another version. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But a lot of this is [that] the questions are raised by openness. When do you freeze, when do you select and pull out and arrange around the text in the way in the way we described with the Talmud? So we’re very curious to see how that happens. Right now we’re very much in the midst of discussion and it’s still going and very much in the process of engaging with this current draft. So we’ll just have to wait and see.
WS: When you have blogs and books that people can comment on, there are a whole bunch of other issues that come up in the role of the author and the editor. And one of those issues is the issue of ego. And I know that a lot of writers are quite sensitive about their work and don’t like being criticized and sometimes don’t like what their editors say. And I think McKenzie is being a fantastic sport about it because obviously he’s opening himself up to all kinds of I don’t know what—bashing or…I’m sure people are being pretty polite, but I’m just wondering how you see the author’s ego either getting in the way of the networked book or evolving somehow?
BV: Yes, all these new forms and all these new processes are definitely rubbing up uncomfortably–a lot of attitudes and a lot of ideas of the stature and position of the author. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. By no means are we implying with this that we think individual authorship is wrong or bad or excessively egotistical, although I think those things can happen. But we’re really trying to create a more dynamic balance between a collaborative mode of engagement and an individual voice. In some cases the collaborative effort is really more what it’s about, like in the case of Wikipedia. In the case here, there’s really an emphasis on the individual voice but opening up to collective knowledge and critique. I think this is not a way that everyone will want to work. I think that people who are used to working in the older, more insulated ways will not necessarily want to change. We’re working with authors who are open to having their egos prodded a bit. And in some ways, I think they’re operating from kind of an intuition, a hunch that at times it’ll be painful, at times it won’t be useful. At times it will just be annoying. But at other times it will really lead to some of their assumptions being tested in profitable ways and open them up to other viewpoints and even just some readings. Sometimes people are suggesting, “You should also read this,” and maybe that will expand their pool of research. So I think that most people when they really think about it understand that the development of ideas is always collaborative, always building on the work of others. And what we’re doing is simply foregrounding that and trying to make it almost into an event or something where the process is visible to a larger number of people. Because we think that the process itself is valuable to witness and trains people to think more critically, trains people to get into discussions that lead to change in society. So in some ways I think we’re just foregrounding something that’s always been there and I think that’s good.
WS: Maybe it’s kind of a peer review in a way?
JW: It is a little bit like a peer review. We have other projects at the Institute which are specifically about creating a situation—a new situation–for peer review within the academy.
BV: And making peer review actually a more public process, inevitably red flags are waved. But reviewer anonymity is very important and it’s very crucial for honesty and the incisiveness of comments. We really think that the overall benefit of foregrounding this process outweighs those concerns and in the case of peer review, to see academics engaging one another with finding ideas, which is what conferences are about. People present papers and then there will be a panel of peers critiquing it openly. There’s a discussion, and in many cases I think think that proves to be incredibly useful for the author of the paper. And they go back and they incorporate things. Some of their assumptions have been tested. Some things were challenged but they said, “No. It led me to believe I really do stand on this.” So that period of testing, that period of public engagement working over, I think that for that to be more visible to students, junior scholars, and the general public is incredibly edifying because you see processes of scholarship. You see people changing their minds sometimes. I think a great part of being an intelligent person is being able to change your mind, when [you get] new information or open up to a new way of seeing things. And in some ways the kind of frozen idea of authorship, these frozen bricks of authority that are handed down, they have some very valuable stabilizing effects and they allow things to be built, but at the same time they downplay that and in some ways try to conceal that things are always a give and take and collaborative wrangling. So yeah, it has a lot to do with peer review. This experiment with Gamer Theory and another experiment that is also going on (that preceded it), which is with Mitchell Stephens, a professor at NYU who is writing a history of atheism. And in his case he’s just maintaining a blog as a sort of public workspace where he’s thinking out loud about the ideas and related current events and meditating on the writing process, not actually putting the book up there—at least not yet—but [?] on a network strategy for writing the book and engaging the readers as he’s doing it.
These experiments actually grew out of initial investigations we were making into academic blogging. We were seeing scholars stepping out of the academy to maintain a public little piece of intellectual turf, bringing their expertise to bear often to a general readership, but really reinvigorating the exchange in their field and even across fields. And [it quickly became] obvious that this is really what academia is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be this vibrant conversation among scholars that the public can dip into and benefit from and use to elucidate other sources of information or to balance them. So we have the case of academics sort of counterbalancing mainstream media coverage of certain very crucial events and giving a fuller picture and really grounding it in expertise.
WS: I think it’s such an exciting idea and when it works it is just so wonderful. I know sometimes you get trolls and vandals and people like that. Obviously Wikipedia’s had to deal with those. When I was researching this, preparing for the interview, I read something about the idea of maybe having people who comment have to earn the right to comment by jumping through certain hurdles. I wonder if you could just talk about that a little bit as a way of maybe…well, I won’t even prompt you. Can you just talk about it a little?
JW: Sure. One of the things we wanted to do with Gamer Theory was to make sure that it was as open as possible to as many people as possible to encourage the most active discussion possible. But we’re definitely aware of spam—the automated robot spam and also trolls. And we did think about instituting some sort of moderation system, user moderation system on Gamer Theory in terms of having people rank other people’s comments to have them gain a level of trust. Basically we’re using sort of the technological backbone of WordPress to make sure that we don’t get the robot spam, which is…it did actually bother us the first couple of days. We were trying to manage that and trying to figure out the right level of moderation to control that. But right now the way that we have it is if you’ve made a comment and we’ve approved it, you can continue to comment without additional moderation from that point on. So the issue of trusted commenters becomes relatively easy to maintain.
BV: But we intentionally kept things very open. We have to take care of these basic concerns, and there’s this base level of moderation, which is very important because otherwise, as Jesse was just saying, you’re going to get flooded with a lot of garbage—automated garbage, which is really distressing at times. But in terms of earning levels—and we did actually have some discussion about that, playfully joking about the idea of levels because this is a book about games–how do you get to the next level? I think that keeping it open right now is the right approach because we’re trying to suggest new ways of working. But presumably these kinds of things catch on and more people start experimenting with them. I can really see this being used in a very open but more governed way, that if a new kind of peer review process were to be instituted by a press, say, where they said, “We want to do something based on Gamer Theory, but we’re going to have these ten people who have committed to being high-level respondents, persistent respondents, responding to all stages of the book and all parts of the book,” then you could sort of create levels. And then maybe there would be some outer layer of more general commenters who want to get in, and maybe after three—I’m getting too specific here—but after three insightful comments then they get access. But I can really see more levels of governance being put on this case by case once this idea has permeated more. We’re trying to take this idea, this really open and casual peer-to-peer conversation that you find in blogging and in academic blogging in particular in terms of scholarship and apply it to a more structured work like a book and a more sustained piece of thought like a book. But certainly people need to be able to edit and moderate discussion and distinguish between the value of certain comments. That’s very important. So I think that’s all to come. And maybe in subsequent experiments that we do.
WS: This is really a new skill that some authors need to develop—being a moderator and leading a discussion. What do you think about that as a role for authors? And do you think that authors who are able to do this successfully will maybe have an edge over those who can’t or who don’t?
JW: We were surprised at how quickly Ken dropped into the role of moderating conversation in terms of responding to everybody that was making a comment, both in the book and in the forum that’s associated with it. And I think that you’ve got a good point. I think that the authors that will have successful networked books are going to be like the successful maitre ds in great New York restaurants. They know how to make every person that comes into the site feel like royalty, or feel valued, and to make the experience for everyone incredibly good.
BV: But I’m also excited about the idea if the networked book becomes active enough and people want badly enough to be in the discussion that it can become a fierce kind of fray to get into. “Wow—you’ve made it into that book?” “You really got bruised in that book.” It’s exciting to think of when this can become a higher stakes arena where really this is a place…because this is unfamiliar territory. People have responded. We got a lot of comments, a lot of valuable reader feedback in this book. But it’s still very unfamiliar territory. The more people start working that way, then the author may not have to be so friendly. It will be like you’ve got to earn it, fight to get it. Let’s fight. Because good ideas often come out of arguments. So I’d love to see these as sites of incredible arguments.
One thing I’ll say too, though, is that both McKenzie and Mitchell Stephens with the blog on the atheism book, both of them have been very gracious and very skillful moderators in discussion, and I think that really comes out of the fact that they’re both teachers. They’re both professors. They both have classes and they’ve both at various points said it’s not all that different from leading a seminar, which they do daily. So for them it’s a fairly natural step to take, and again, so many of the things that we’re working with, they’re not new. They’re just newly emphasized or newly foregrounded. There are plenty of professors who will structure a class around a book they’re writing and really work with students to develop ideas and have them help with their research. And I think that those tend to be very exciting classes for students. They really feel like they’re in on something new and something exciting and something that’s developing and feel like they’re making an impact. So again, this is not something new. It’s just that we’re trying to bring it into the foreground because the digital networks and the Internet, they enable this kind of work, and it’s very exciting.
WS: It is exciting because now anybody can be part of something that they had to be part of a closed community in order to experience before. They had to be a student paying tuition or something like that, and now you can just sit down at your computer and boom—there you are. It’s wonderful.
JW: It’s definitely the value of the Internet.
WS: If you consider non-academic authors, do you think that non-academic authors of networked books will be working harder doing more work for the same amount of money, less money, or could that actually benefit them. I mean it is a lot of work, obviously, to moderate a discussion on a book and then take those comments into account as you’re working.
BV: I think that it may be a bigger leap for some non-academic authors to take because they’re not used to leading seminars. But I also think, just to backtrack a little bit about “Will authors be at a disadvantage if they’re not a skillful moderator of a networked book?,” it’s important to say that we’re not positing this idea or exploring this idea of the networked book because we think it’s what should replace all books or all ways of writing. In a lot of ways, the idea of the networked book is coming out of the idea of the open source software movement, and in a lot of cases what you’re doing there is a lot of people are benefiting from open source software. A lot of people use it and it’s often better than commercial equivalents. But the group of people that are actually building it and working on the development are a much smaller, kind of hard core user group, a leading edge kind of group. And we might find that to be the case with a lot of networked books, that this isn’t how all books should be, but this is a really interesting way to develop books, especially books that I think are centered around big ideas that are really intended to facilitate discussion. I think [there is] potential for it to be more open and more democratic than open source software because, in terms of the development of open source software, because we’re not dealing with computer languages and code, which I think will always be a minority [?]. We’re dealing with ideas and language, and more people can engage in those. And there’s an element of a kind of civic participation–I mean in terms of when the book is about civil issues or political issues. So it’s a more engaged way of being a reader. But to reiterate, I don’t think this is the model for every kind of book. And we can get into discussing literary fiction later because there were some questions you had about that. But I think it’s much less apparent that this is the right model for that kind of writing.
I will say that in terms of being at an advantage or disadvantage, if you do embark on this networked model, you really should want to. It should really be the way you want to work. You should be open to discussing things. And you should be, I think, willing to put time into being a presence on the site.
I’ll give one concrete example. Something that came out shortly before Gamer Theory was, you’re probably aware, this book Pulse. It’s a general science book from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. They embarked on a marketing experiment where they were going to serialize the book in a blog form and ultimately give the entire thing away for free on the Web. It had feedback mechanisms, commenting, rating of different sections, all sorts of ways you could plug it into different parts of the Web. Linking, bookmarking, tagging. But apart from an intro letter from the author, it was pretty clear that he wasn’t really going to be there much.
There are other reasons why I think this experiment was not successful, but pretty much there were no comments left. I think it was because, why comment if you don’t feel that the author is going to be responding? There were other problems. I think that they were serializing a book that wasn’t meant to be serialized. They were giving it away a bit at a time rather than putting the whole thing up so you felt like you were being teased.
I think the presence of the author is important in a networked book. On the other hand, you might set up a networked book where the author is no longer in the picture. We could set up a networked environment for a classic text, and then it becomes a question, who are the people who step forward or emerge as discussion leaders or moderators. I think that it’s possible to have large, unstructured conversations, but there will be a need for people to rise and facilitate or moderate. So you really have to want to do that for it to work.
WS: Well, you’ve touched on something that I wanted to ask you about, which is what if you try to make a networked book and no one shows up? Let’s just assume the author is willing and is there. For example, I don’t know if you would call this a networked book, but I know that Amazon has a feature now where “Let’s have a forum about this book and everybody discuss it,” and they’re all blank or, well, all the ones that I’ve been looking at are just empty.
JW: All the ones I’ve looked at too.
WS: So what happens in that case?
BV: This is actually a really interesting question for us at the Institute. One of the roles that we feel like we have to develop alongside the experiments with the networked books is what it means to be a publisher of networked books, and what the role of the publisher is when we have books that are published on the Internet. And what is it that we have to do next? So part of what our responsibility was, at least we felt like in this case, to make sure that there was some notification to the community and to the general public that this thing was happening. And that meant that we got in touch with some people to let them know, in fact, that there is this interesting book with interesting content by a really great author and that we’d done some weird interface stuff to it to try and experiment with the form. That garnered some good initial response, and that seems like one of the reasons that Gamer Theory is successful. It’s not the only reason. Certainly it’s more like this is a perfect storm of all these things coming together, but definitely, without any one of those things, I think it would not have been the success that it is right now. Yeah, there was a lot of buzz and a lot of publicity that came up around the launch of Gamer Theory, and word of mouth and linking and some prominent citations on some big blogs and some big articles about it certainly helped.
But I do think that in the case of Amazon forums, they’re a nice idea in principle, but I really think that people are much less inclined to engage in these things when they’re obviously about marketing. On the other hand, you can look at the example of reader reviews on Amazon. People use those all the time, and they’re very useful just to get a quick snapshot of what are some opinions, five opinions of this book. And I can just absorb them and incorporate them into my perusal of this book. So in some ways they’ve worked and in other forms they haven’t, and it’s interesting to see which ones fail and which ones don’t.
JW: I actually think if we take a step back and revisit the last question, the reason that the Amazon forums are not successful is because who’s the person that’s leading the discussion? There’s nobody there. Nobody is stepping up to take that first leap and throw out conversation topics and act as the moderator. All you have is the idea of Amazon itself, which is a little bit disconcerting if you’re going to be talking about something as near and dear to your heart as this particular book that you’re reading.
WS: That’s a good point. I also think that book reviews are sort of a one-off, but conversation requires you to be there on an ongoing basis and you have to be pretty motivated to do that.
JW: Right.
WS: I don’t mean the author. I mean the….
JW: The person involved in the conversation.
WS: Yeah.
BV: Absolutely. And that again raises the question, what is the time frame for one of these networked books? A networked book in some cases might be an endless, never-ending process. Sometimes it’s more of an event. It’s a thing that goes on for a while, it’s a workshopping period, and then you close it off and put another version up. But what Jesse was saying before, though, about this leading us to think about a new idea of what a publisher is in the new environment, it really made me think that one thing a publisher does is maintain a relationship with their authors. And the relationship they maintain with their readers is more about getting the book out there and selling it. In the case of a network publishing system, the publisher starts to have a different relationship with readers, and the editor too. Probably this is more about the editor. You start to identify, these readers are very important. They’ve been consistently contributing. Their contributions are valuable. The book as a whole would be less valuable without this response. And you begin to think of publishers as those publishers [who] have not only great authors, but they have great readers. And you want to be there to read these authors and to read these readers. So you start forming relationships with the readers, and you start [encouraging them] to stay in the game. And they may develop a kind of stature of their own for being high-level respondents to a stable of work by a stable of authors.
So again this is all just sort of thinking out loud about trying to imagine where we could find ourselves a little further down the road if we start developing a more robust ecosystem of network publishing. But yeah, it’s demanding. We’re not doing it because we think it’s going to be easy and effortless for readers to read in this way. It’s a very engaged kind of reading. But I think there’s a payoff when you feel that something really is coming of it. And I think that what’s been happening in Gamer Theory, and happening on without gods on Mitch Stephens’ blog. There’s a feeling that something’s happening, it’s leading somewhere. There’s a great author working on an important work and it’s moving somewhere. So people are keeping up with it, and I think that as more of these experiments come out, more people will be more inclined to have that be one of the kinds of reading that they do. Sometimes they just might want to take a book [and] bury their head in it, you know, not come out until they’re done. Sometimes they want to do more active reading, I’m going to do network reading, having a conversation about what I’m reading.
WS: It’s really interesting when you mention publishers having a relationship with their readers because how many readers can actually even tell you the publishers of the books they read, with one exception that comes to mind, and that is O’Reilly?
BV: Right.
WS: The tech publisher. But really, it seems to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, that most publishers are transparent to readers.
BV: I think that’s right.
JW: I think that’s definitely the case. I don’t actually know if our role is to be non-transparent. But we’re definitely trying to fit into a role of enabler. We want to enable the author to put his text up using some technology that he may not be familiar with. And we want to enable the readers to contribute back to the author. We want to encourage them to do so. So it’s not actually terribly important that they know who we are. We just need to be able to let them do what they want to do. And this comes out of a Web tradition of usability and [customer service].
BV: But I would say that another thing that contributed to the success of Gamer Theory and the high-level activity that has taken place there is not just that we got the word out and it was mentioned a few places, but we already had been developing a reputation as a group that was thinking in interesting ways about the future of publishing and new kinds of books. So it did have that kind of mark of “Oh, you recognize that publisher. Oh they put this out so maybe that’ll be interesting.” So it does have a role, but absolutely—we are just trying to be facilitators and enable these kinds of things primarily.
WS: What are the implications of the networked book for librarians?
JW: That is a very good question. One of the things that we haven’t talked about enough here maybe is the ability for things to be archived and preserved long-term. Things that exist as software, things that exist on the current hardware of our computers, are extremely volatile, and they don’t have the lasting power of the bound book. This is a problem. I have a library and information science background, and a lot of my friends that are librarians really wonder about the future of digital preservation. There are efforts ongoing in the library community especially, as I’m sure you know, to help create an infrastructure for digital preservation that will be transportable to different venues so that people will start plugging their content into it and save them. Maybe one of the most well-known is the MIT ESPACE. But I’m not exactly sure how something like Gamer Theory can fit into a project like that, especially because one of the things that’s so important about this particular experiment is that it’s growing. It’s in an ongoing growth process, and what it is today is different from what it’s going to be tomorrow, so it’s difficult to find the archiving points to figure out whether this is a particular version or not. The best you can do is back up frequently.
WS: What about access to specific points, or even to the whole work—well, maybe not the whole work—but, for example, at what level do you catalog, and do you mention all the contributors, all the commenters, or do you index what they have to say, and what about as it changes? How do you keep up with a moving target for cataloging purposes?
JW: Definitely some very big issues.
WS: Hard to answer, isn’t it?
JW: Very hard to answer. We haven’t been able to build in any of the structure to do that because currently we’re limited by the technology that we’re using. WordPress is wonderful stuff. It makes certain things very easy. But it is not enabled to do things like digital preservation. It’s very difficult to separate out things except for by time. We’ve actually instituted some plug-ins to make it easier for us to potentially roll back changes should Ken decide to change his text at all. But in terms of collecting the commenters as a separate group and being able to pull them apart based on the time that they made their comments and the version of the book that they made their comments on, that’s definitely an area that needs work. This is one of the things that the experiment was meant to provoke in terms of finding the weak areas that people have not thought about yet in terms of developing the networked book.
BV: Yeah, it’s a really big question, and this project has certain strong points that are really our focus, which is facilitating the discussion around the book. We feel like it’s been pretty successful in showing how that can be a significant factor in a book’s growth. These archiving questions, these versioning questions, yeah, these were not things that we were shooting after with this. This was just [pointed at] certain kinds of areas. But it’s a huge question, and it’s a big question, how do you trace conversation over an evolving document? We have some things on the back end here where we can record different versions of the text, other than correcting typos and stuff. This has pretty much been a stable draft in the course so far of the Gamer Theory experiment. But once you start actually having new versions of a text, yeah, it’s exactly as you said. How do you know which comments apply to which, and are some comments rendered irrelevant when you’re looking at the newer version of the text?
Going back to the example of Wikipedia, Wikipedia has this very detailed revision history with every article. That’s good. They could be more readable and more accessible, but they’re there, and they’re very useful, and it’s incredibly [ ] that they’re there. They also have these talk pages, these discussion pages, where communities that are developing a page can sort of write down discussions about different points that have been negotiated about this article, just giving some basic information on how it’s being structured and some pointers on what they’re doing. But those are two separate pages. The revision history is one page, the discussion page is another page, and the article is its own page. For the new kinds of reading and writing that we’re talking about, those need to be better integrated. How, it’s not totally clear. How can you integrate the discussion with the text when the text has been changing? So these are huge questions, and we don’t have all the answers. But we have a lot of the questions.
WS: This is obviously something that librarians can sink their teeth into, and for librarians in a changing world who are looking around for new ways to make themselves useful. I think this is a great opportunity.
BV: Librarians are probably the most important people now.
JW: Yeah.
BV: At least they should be, ‘cause so many of these questions fall squarely into their purview.
JW: I’m sure it must be a bit of a great thing to hear that coming from some people who aren’t librarians. But we think that librarians are extremely important for the future.
WS: Well good! As a former librarian I agree with you. Are there any implications at all of networked books for booksellers?
JW: That’s a very good question. Right now we think that the best experiments in networked books are going to be done by people who are not interested in selling their book per se. Ken is eventually going to publish this in a paperbound book, and he’s going to sell that, but it’s already going to have been online in its full glory for nine months. The important question is to find some sort of business model that might come out of developing networked books that allow this conversation [and a vision] and things like that. It’s also, to me at least, a question a little bit about price point, and at what point can we ask for very small contributions from the readers to maintain a sort of low level of income from what is potentially a free resource. Because once it’s online, there’s not–in terms of actual resources–there’s not a lot more that it’s going to consume.
BV: Yeah, we’re definitely thinking more about the conceptual questions than the economic questions, although of course those are really important. But we think it’s almost too early to start…if we had set about doing Gamer Theory thinking about all these things we want it to do and want to happen. But [if] we also wanted it to be profitable, it just would have crippled it, I think. These things are very new and unfamiliar territory for both the authors and the readers. I really think for these things to be explored, it has to be open. Gamer Theory is not really about having a copy of Gamer Theory. Eventually when it’s published by a university press, it will be relevant to you. But here it’s just a URL and you just go there. So it’s more like a place. And it’s like a place in that there’s other people and [ ] these conversations going on, and it’s different one day than it was the other day. Like a place. Eventually if these places become compelling enough and people want to be in these places, you might be able to start charging for access to these places in much the same way that people have to buy an account to play an online multiplayer video game. The video game analogy is coming up a lot with this book, although McKenzie’s looking at single-player games. But the multiplayer game financial model may be relevant to publishers of networked books in the future.
JW: But we do want to emphasize that right now we think that that will just kill any new networked book experiment that comes out, at least in the near future.
BV: Too early.
WS: What about advertising? I know you need to get a certain number of eyeballs, I suppose, in order to make that work, but have you thought about that at all? Just like in context ads or Google ads, things like that.
JW: It would be difficult to include something like that in Gamer Theory just because even a small level like the Google AdWords would be an intrusion on the whole idea of this book as a private place that happens to be shared with a lot of other people that are in the same spot. It’s a strange mix of public and private, but involving any sort of marketing, it just felt wrong, especially for this one. In terms of including advertising for other networked book experiments, I sort of feel like Pulse is one of the examples that proves that putting marketing in any sort of primary position makes the networked book less valuable.
BV: It makes the whole thing seem disingenuous. I think Pulse is a good cautionary tale.
WS: It’s interesting because you have conflicting needs, I guess. The author, unless they’re an academic, needs to make some kind of income from the work, and yet if they rely on advertising for that, it turns off readers, who may want to support the author but maybe not by being bombarded with ads. So it’s really a dilemma.
JW: It’s a tough choice, but I think that what we need to do and what needs to happen with networked books is that we need to not only experiment with alternative forms and find the right kind of content that fits the networked book, but also find the right sorts of delivery mechanisms for it and ways to monetize it. Cory Doctorow released his book in PDF and ended up, at least according to him, probably selling more copies than he thought he would. Eric Von Hippel also released [two] books online from the MIT business school. He wrote a book on innovation, and he thought that he would try some innovation himself, and so he put it out in PDF. They made a print run of about 2000, which is fairly standard for academic books, and they ended up selling three or four times that amount because of the interest that was generated by the free copy. So this is an alternative way of maybe taking something that you think is free and you’re not going to make any money on but eventually cashing in on. Unfortunately it does require that you have a print version eventually. There are probably some other ways to do it as well. I know that [ ] does micropayments. He does 25 cents to read his little comic, to read his online graphic novel. Twenty-five cents, as long as it’s easy enough to get him the money, it’s nothing, and a lot of people will do it. In terms of other ways of monetizing I’m not really sure, but I think that there are ways to do it besides advertising and besides charging subscription access, although both of them will probably be adopted by publishers that are moving into this area in the near future.
BV: Yeah. The more I think about it though, for a networked book, and the kind we’re talking about where the interaction of readers and the interaction between reader and author is really a crucial element, the online game model might be what will eventually work if enough of these books are produced. If J.K. Rowling did a Harry Potter where the whole idea was, there was a core narrative, you would read it in the way that you read the prior novels, but there’s a whole new foreground dimension of reader interaction and reader add-on value to the book–people collaborating on appendices and just having discussions about the book. That stuff is already happening. I just used a very mainstream and commercially successful example because there’s a huge fan culture around there. Part of it, even if you’re thinking purely in commercial terms, is how do you incorporate the fan culture into the space of the book so the book becomes a place that people want to be. So instead of going out and buying a copy of the latest Harry Potter, they buy an account on the new one that’s online. Or maybe they do both because there are two ways they want to read it. So it’s more about being there than having one.
WS: Well that segues nicely into my next question, which has to do with something you mentioned before, and that’s fiction and whether the networked book will work well with ficiton.
JW: We’re not sure. Actually, Ben’s example right there is a really interesting one, but there’s something about the way that text is written that makes it better suited for a networked book or not. In Ken’s case, we have found that his particular style of writing in small paragraphs is really conducive to a Web layout. At the same time, we find that the Web layout impedes a little bit of the way you should be reading the book because it is, in fact, still a linear book although we’re presenting it in terms of single paragraphs. I think that if you’re trying to deal with something that has long passages of exposition or something that has a very straightforward narrative, it will be a little more difficult to smartly chunk the pieces so that you can come up with something that can be presented [in] a Web format. Because there still is a very big difference between reading pages which you can flip through rather quickly and reading on a Web site, which we have not yet figured out how to make fast enough so that it clicks almost instantaneously.
BV: A big and a very sensitive zone for people in thinking about how the role of books will change and the form of books will change in the future is literary fiction. Because for a lot of people that’s the most pleasurable, intoxicating kind of reading and the most intimate kind of reading.
JW: And in many ways it’s what people consider when they think of a book.
BV: Right. But of course there are all kinds of books, and a lot of books already are becoming obsolete in their print book form because it just doesn’t make any sense when you have a networked environment for reference works or for listings, phone books. These kinds of things obviously just make more sense. They were only in the shape of a book before because it was the most convenient and economical way to distribute them. So those kinds of things quickly change, and we don’t really mind so much. Other things like fiction I feel like the new forms and the new network practices and the digital environment in many ways might serve as a foil for these forms, really emphasizing what is unique about them, what they do best and really can’t be improved in the new environment. In some ways it would be watered down or dissipated for a deep kind of reading of a linear work that really is about immersion. I think that literary fiction will be very durable in the kind of form it is.
Then again, for teaching purposes, if I was a teacher working with a variety of literary texts, I might want to put them into a Gamer Theory-type environment because that would serve as a really interesting virtual seminar space. But it would incorporate what the students were talking about into the class document and so wouldn’t just be discussion that just flies around the room. Actually the class would be building a document around a text. We so far are dealing with books that are kind of in the middle. They’re books that are linear, but they’re more about ideas and really intended to spark discussion. So it’s sort of an interesting middle ground to be playing with. You might actually be able to process Gamer Theory more easily if you had it in front of you on paper, just read it front to end because it is linear. But we really think the kind of book it is, it’s very well served ultimately by the environment we’ve put it in, which foregrounds the discourse.
WS: You’re talking about two different processes in a way. One is the writing process. The author is going through and looking for comments as they’re building the book. And then the other one is once the book has already been written, let’s say in a teaching situation, then you’re commenting on what’s already there.
BV: Yeah, there are all kinds of scenarios.
JW: I was just going to say that yes, we’ve done this experiment with the networked book, and there are so many others that can be done to explore the different avenues that people can build conversation around a text and for the different purposes that they want to do so.
WS: I was thinking a little bit about illustrations. I know that McKenzie had something to do with—I can’t remember exactly what it was—but something that got me thinking about illustrations. Of course when you have pictures, then you get into all these intellectual property issues. But I suppose there is an opportunity for people to contribute pictures, whether they’re their own or public domain or something. Maybe you could take a classic text like a Dickens or a Jane Austen and have people illustrate it somehow. I guess that would be a networked book too.
BV: Sure. It’s a new kind of reader annotation. Usually we think of annotation as a textual note, but annotation can happen in multiple media. So yeah, you add images. You record yourself saying the names of films.
Actually, the core project of the Institute that we haven’t talked about is a big piece of open source software called Sophie, which is a tool for building networked multimedia documents—books that are born digital and really are meant to be engaged with in a digital environment. The interplay of media forms will be very intuitive and very easy there. So I think the kinds of books people will be able to make using that tool will open up those kinds of avenues you’re talking about, where it will be easy and actually will make a lot of sense and be intuitive to annotate in pictures or annotate in other media or reillustrate the book or have different versions of the illustrated book.
WS: That is something I wanted to ask you about because I noticed that Sophie’s coming out very soon, and by the time you hear this podcast, it will be out already. Can you talk a little bit about Sophie and about how you put together a networked book?
JW: In terms of how you put together a networked book, the idea is that you’ll start with probably a text, but not necessarily. You can make pretty much anything in Sophie but the spine of the book. You can make it a long bit of text, which would be something like Gamer Theory. Or you could make it a film or you could make it an audio recording like this podcast. What that allows you to do, then, is to collate a whole bunch of different types of material around a certain idea and express yourself in a lot of different ways. And that’s the purpose of Sophie. That’s why we’re writing it.
WS: I’m really looking forward to playing with it.
JW: We definitely are looking forward to getting it out there into the world so people can play with it.
WS: How do you think that networked books and the social networking that goes on with them will change the way humans think and interact with the world? Small question, huh?
BV: That’s sort of the central question of the entire Institute. That’s the big question.
JW: Yeah. We’re trying to answer it basically through our continuing existence, but some first thoughts on that are…We hope that by creating these types of networked books that foreground the process of thinking, and as Ben had mentioned before, showing people changing their minds, we will create the sort of environment where people can engage in a more democratic fashion overall; where they can engage with people who have written things, and by responding to them in either written or film or audio—in any media, really—to create a multimedia multi-person conversation that will create a dialectic that improves humanity overall. It is a gigantic question, and there are no small answers to that question. The best thing we can do is continue to make things a little bit different and a little bit better.
BV: I think that it’s very difficult to do. Some of the things we’re suggesting would be best, a [ ] course for the way we use these new communication tools that are developed. In many ways [this is] not new–a sort of Enlightenment idea, a society of readers. An enlightened society is one that’s critically engaged and [has] a salon culture of publicly discussing big ideas that impact society. With the proliferation of new media outlets and the mass amateurization of publishing and the challenge to the hegemony of mainstream media and this kind of interplay that we see between grass roots media and blogging and media, it’s very easy to see it as a romantic and positive story. But a really big problem is the signal to noise ratio. There’s a lot of fragmentation. There’s a lot of repetition. It’s a mistake to assume that the Internet, because it’s about connectivity, really does break down all the barriers, really does connect everyone. In some ways, it just allows you to much more elaborately weave a shell of self-confirmation around you.
There are famous diagrams that show in the United States the left-wing political blogosphere and the right-wing political blogosphere. They’re these fuzzy clumps and you can see strands connect them when there have been people who read both or authors of some have commented on others. They are almost totally separate. There’s very little interaction between the two. That’s just a very obvious example of the way that all this connectivity doesn’t actually necessarily connect people or open up understanding. So to read intelligently in this new environment is actually incredibly difficult and challenging. To be able to hold all these sources alongside each other and to be able to filter out the noise from the signal and to compare the signals requires a really great critical nimbleness from the reader. In a lot of ways what we’re saying is that we’re really raising the bar. We’ve created a huge ocean of noise and communication, and we need to find ways to structure and build critical paths through it so that we can impact the real world and society. In a lot of ways we’re trying to outline a vision for what we think would be best, but it’s a daunting job.
WS: To be continued, then. I hope our listeners and Searcher readers will comment on our blog and Searcher’s blog and your Web site, and that segues nicely into your contact details. What is your URL?
JW: We’re at futureofthebook.org. Our blog is futureofthebook.org/blog. That’s actually where we spend all of our time discussing these big ideas.
BV: Yeah, if you want to get a sense of what we’re about or what we’re thinking about day to day, the blog is actually—I think of it more as our home page even though we have a main site which has information. Futureofthebook.org/blog is really our daily window into our thinking and our conversations. And we’ve been talking a lot about Gamer Theory: that’s futureofthebook.org/GamerTheory. And without gods, the blog by Mitchell Stevens, developing his book about atheism, is futureofthebook.org/MitchellStephens. That’s Mitchell with two ls. Those are reference points for a lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about.
WS: Great. Well, I will put those on the show notes as well as in the audio, which you’ve already done.
BV: Oh, and Stephens with a “ph.”
WS: Great. Well I know you have to go, so I just want to thank you so much, both of you, for being with us today on The Writing Show. I am so excited about this idea and this discussion, and I just hope that we can continue in some fashion in the future.
BV: Great.
JW: Great.
BV: And always feel free to turn up on our blog and comment and keep the conversation going.
WS: I absolutely will!
JW: Thanks for having us.
BV: Thank you very much.
WS: A couple of notes about this fascinating interview. First, there is a transcript available on our Web site at http://www.writingshow.com. You will find it through a link in the notes for this show, or, look under “interview transcripts” on the right hand side of the page.
Second, my article for Searcher magazine based on this interview will appear in November. The Web site for Searcher is www.infotoday.com/Searcher.
This week we got a comment from a listener about novelist Jeff Rivera’s interview. Jeff wrote the urban novel Forever My Lady. Our listener had this to say:
Jeff Rivera’s interview was one of the most inspiring I’ve ever heard. He casually mentioned that he’d been homeless, living in his car with his mother and his pets, and before I had the chance to get over the shock of those words, he went on to talk about the book he’d written, his reason for doing so, and, after self-publishing, going on to find an agent and a publisher! There was no bitterness, only an upbeat attitude and a desire to help other latinos who want to write. I truly hope he has a long, prosperous career as a writer.
So do I, listener! If Forever My Lady is any indication, I am sure he will.
Don’t forget that. The Colorado Gold Writers’ Conference is still open for registration. Dates are September 8th, 9th, and 10th. Sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, the conference takes place at The Renaissance Denver Hotel I-70. The program features presentations by writers, editors, and agents.
You can find more information about the conference at www.rmfw.org, the Conference link.
And on August 19th and 20th we hold our next Writing Show writing weekend. If you’re not gallivanting around during the last few days of summer vacation, this is the time to make it happen. Now I know how difficult it is to make yourself sit down and write. Getting over that hump is the most daunting obstacle facing writers. That’s why we’re here to egg you on and support you. So here are some ideas for making yourself do it:
- Promise yourself that if you sit down and write for only 5 minutes, you can reward yourself with something you like—an ice cream, a trip to the movies, skipping work one day (did I say that?), or some other indulgence. I’ll bet that once you get started, that 5 minutes will turn into 10 or 15 or 30 or even an hour.
- Do not start with something difficult. Just write whatever comes into your head, whether it’s a dream you had last night, your to-do list, a description of your desk, or a political rant. Just start writing. Once you have that down, start making it stylish. Hook your reader. Make the first item of your to-do list mysterious or shocking. Write about the history of your desk or where it might end up some day. Take your dream and embellish it. Pretend you’re going to turn it into a Roger Corman movie or use it as the basis of a fantasy novel. Turn that blank page into something you can work with.
Okay. Try those ideas, and please, let me know how they worked out. Paula@writingshow.com. If you had trouble, I want to hear about it. If you feel proud of yourself, I want to hear about it. I’ll be going through the same torture and could use some commiseration or encouragement, whichever you can manage.
Don’t forget that all you need is three free hours. Three hours isn’t long. And if you can’t do three hours, do two, or one, or half an hour, but just do something! I know you can do this.
Next week, journalist and author Bob Andelman stops by to discuss his biography Will Eisner: A Spirited Life. You will love this spirited discussion that melds the writing of biography with the world of comic books.
And coming soon, screenwriter Andrew Findlay stops by to talk about the challenges facing screenwriters today. Andrew has worked in television and movies all over the world and has some very interesting observations about Hollywood, among other things. Also in the works, pro blogger Nick Wilson of Performancing.com returns to talk about monetizing your blog. And of course, on September 4th we announce the winners of our first chapter of a novel contest. Also coming up, our first reality show. It’s a bit early for details, but I’ll have them for you soon.
That’s it for this week’s show. Thanks for listening, and have a great week. I’m Paula B. for The Writing Show, which you will find, as always, at www.writingshow.com.