Top notch speech, transcribed here. Sorry, folks, you gotta read the whole thing, even the bit at the end focused on the speaker's audience (Danes...)
The transition for some.
Chris Anderson isn't the only guy wondering if the price of content is heading towards zero. Mr. Marginal Revolution just noticed, too.
Whatever this blogs readers think of the National Book Awards winners and finalists each year, one thing they (they = the National Book Foundation) are doing right is thinking about the future of reading. Executive Director Harold Augenbraum is blogging, and you should add it to your Future of the Book RSS feed, because Harold's got some interesting things to say. He attended New York Comicon over the weekend.
We must always remember that there are only two players that count, the author who creates the work and the reader who pays for it. All the rest are intermediaries who should add value and invariably also cost. If value is not seen then just like in other sectors no one’s position is safe, agents, publishers, printers, distributors, retailers etc.—Brave New World, via the ever alert and on-the-ball Kassia.
The Times tech blog reads Steve Jobs.
I moved to write this entry not by my desire to hustle this book—though readers know that hustling books (baby on knee) is what gets me up in the morning and keeps me up at night—but this magnificent piece written about it by the brain trust at the Institute for the Future of the Book. That's also the reason why I have this in my The Future is Now category. First off, a little bit of the piece, then some general thoughts about p-books and e-books, and then some other folks ways-of-looking-at-Womans-World.
Just as Barthes finds structures by which to decipher what the reader experiences in "Sarrasine", there can be found structures to decipher what the reader experiences when reading Woman's World. At one level, there is the story – a sequence of words that could be put into a .TXT file and be exactly the same. At another level, there's the presentation. This is something that's hard to precisely pin down, but it's best explained by pointing out the difference between reading a plain text version of Rawle's story and the collaged version of the same. Try looking at Rawle's p. 307 and my neutral typesetting of it...
So, one thing I've noticed when I make my gauntlet-down-throwing at various panel discussions about how critical it is for independent publishers to be publishing electronically is that my corollary to that—the need to create print books whose objectness is far more unique than the generic widgets that populate most bookstores—gets ignored. Something like Woman's World is not currently possible electronically, not in any dynamic sense. It suggests a rich future, in fact, for p-books, provided that we cut down trees to fashion them into something more transporting and sui generis than the 10's of 1000's of broadly identical objects currently produced.
But I wouldn't be properly respecting Rawle's Womans World if I left it just at that—herewith Jezebel's post on the topic with, critically, all the comments—most though not all, are speculative, but starting points for conversation, nevertheless. And here is Bethanne Patrick's blog entry on Publishers Weekly, itself in a dialog with the book, with Jezebel, with PW's own review...
Tim O'Reilly has a conference called Tools of Change, which is basically about the Future of Publishing, it was completely sold out, just last week, everyone is talking about it—so where's your report, Richard?
Well, the frustrating thing about independent publishing is that you spend so much time doing what you absolutely have to do that there is no time for discretionary activity like attending such conferences, plus Counterpoint's ducats are not going to extend to paying the fee to attend such pricey conferences and my lame ass was unable to get itself a seat on a panel, sigh.
Thus I'm as dependent as you on reports from others—the usual suspects (links are to the posts tagged with our current subject matter...): Galleycat, Booksquare, Jeff Gomez, and so on.
But here's a nice summation at Medialoper, itself referencing an article by Kevin Kelly, "Better Than Free," which is basically the next best thing to Rules for a Business Plan for Existing in the Future of Publishing.
Featherproof Books = part of The Future of Publishing.
"The Last Book is a project to compile written as well as visual statements in which the authors may leave a legacy for future generations. The premise of the project is that book-based culture is coming to an end. On one hand, new technologies have introduced cultural mutations by transferring information to television and the Internet. On the other, there has been an increasing deterioration in the educational systems (as much in the First World as on the periphery) and a proliferation of religious and anti-intellectual fundamentalisms. The Last Book will serve as a time-capsule and leave a document and testament of our time, as well as a stimulus for a possible reactivation of culture in case of disappearance by negligence, catastrophe or conflagration.Contributions to this project will be limited to one page and may be e-
mailed to lastbook.madrid@gmail.com or mailed to Luis Camnitzer, 124
Susquehanna Ave., Great Neck NY 11021, USA. In case of submission of
originals, these will not be returned. The book will be exhibited as
an installation at the entrance of the Museum of the National Library
of Spain in Madrid at some point of 2008. Pages will be added during
the duration of the project, with the intention of an eventual
publication of an abridged version selected by Luis Camnitzer, curator
of the project. The tentative deadline is March 31, 2008."
One of publishing's primary prognosticators, Mike Shatzkin, has put in his fifteen cents for the year—here it is, and I'll make a brief comment on it—he overstates significantly the ability of existing companies to operate the future infrastucture, in particular his idea that Lightning Source and B&N will somehow take control of delivering eBooks to the iPhone. Why on earth would Apple bother—it's not as if they went to HMV for assistance in creating iTunes. Books are the last thing of Steve Jobs's mind.
Also, one more place to add to your RSS feed, probably the brainiest of them all...The Institute for the Future of the Book. if:book
I've been trying to keep track of all the important things being said about the [digital] future of books and I'm failing so I'm justing going to have to do a set of links as often as I can remember, and I've created a new category, The Future is Now. It'll be very ad-hoc, but I'm going to give you one link now—this—and some places that those of you who are serious about new business models should add to your RSS feeds, just as I have...
Booksquare
Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age
The Long Tail
Times emit
Medialoper
