Together with Pete Woodbridge, I have edited a living book in the excellent new Open Humanities Press book series Living Books about Life, edited by Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall. Our edited book, entitled Symbiosis: Ecologies, Assemblages and Evolution, brings together openly available science and humanities articles on symbiosis, complemented by videos, podcasts and images that further illustrate the topic. The books are all fully editable and ready for you to reuse, complement and re-contextualise. You can find the book here.

From the introduction:

We should stress that this living book is also a symbiotic book. It is a merging and co-habitation of different media-species, a mash-up of text and video, sound and images, pixels and living, material tissue. The digital medium has in many ways made it possible for the book to become increasingly infected with foreign (non-textual) elements as it evolves into something different; into a becoming which might even lead to the disappearance of the book as we currently know it and to the rise of a new symbiotic book-evolved hybrid species.

In this context this symbiotic book on symbiosis also constitutes a tool for a critique which is directed at visions of the book which position it as a static, stable entity, a lifeless thing made out of dead trees. As a concept the symbiotic book argues for the book as becoming, as infinitely transforming and interacting and crossing over into other books and other discourses, a machinic assemblage of various discrete media entities, all of them interconnected. In this vision the networked, liquid books in the Living Books About Life series form an ecology of information, one that grows stronger and expands in mutual cooperation. Cooperation as books, as ‘lifeless entities’, or non-organic matter, also takes places with and via the living, with the human assemblages who create the books, feed into them, and make them part of the networks through which they algorithmically spread over the web, keeping the book alive, keeping it social.

The symbiotic book crosses boundaries, between the life sciences and the humanities, but also between the scholarly world and society at large, thus making it open for infection, for re-use, for remixing and change. The symbiotic book still has borders, though. Evolution is a slow process, heavily influenced by environmental and cultural barriers. Nevertheless, maybe some genetic modification might be beneficial in this respect.

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Open Humanities Press publishes twenty-one open access Living Books About Life

LIVING BOOKS ABOUT LIFE
http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

The pioneering open access humanities publishing initiative, Open Humanities Press (OHP) (http://openhumanitiespress.org), is pleased to announce the release of 21 open access books in its series Living Books About Life (http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org).

Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and edited by Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall, Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life — with life understood both philosophically and biologically — which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge, said: ‘This book series would not be possible without open access.  On the author side, it takes splendid advantage of the freedom to reuse and repurpose open-access research articles.  On the other side, it passes on that freedom to readers. In between, the editors made intelligent selections and wrote original introductions, enhancing each article by placing it in the new context of an ambitious, integrated understanding of life, drawing equally from the sciences and humanities’.

By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost, low-tech manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, commented: ‘This remarkable series transforms the humble Reader into a living form, while breaking down the conceptual barrier between the humanities and the sciences in a time when scholars and activists of all kinds have taken the understanding of life to be central. Brilliant in its simplicity and concept, this series is a leap towards an exciting new future’.

One of the most important aspects of the Living Books About Life series is the impact it has had on the attitudes of the researchers taking part, changing their views on open access and raising awareness of issues around publishers’ licensing and copyright agreements. Many have become open access advocates themselves, keen to disseminate this model among their own scholarly and student communities. As Professor Erica Fudge of the University of Strathclyde and co-editor of the living book on Veterinary Science, put it, ‘I am now evangelical about making work publicly available, and am really encouraging colleagues to put things out there’.

These ‘books about life’ are themselves ‘living’, in the sense they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research — together with interactive maps and audio-visual material — into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus involved in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data, iPad apps and e-book readers such as Kindle.

Tara McPherson, editor of VECTORS, Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, said: ‘It is no hyperbole to say that this series will help us reimagine everything we think we know about academic publishing.  It points to a future that is interdisciplinary, open access, and expansive.’

Funded by JISC, Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions, Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent.

Books:

* Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars, edited by Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Bioethics™: Life, Politics, Economics, edited by Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Biosemiotics: Nature, Culture, Science, Semiosis, edited by Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan University)
* Cognition and Decision in Non-Human Biological Organisms, edited by Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University)
* Cosmetic Surgery: Medicine, Culture, Beauty, edited by Bernadette Wegenstein (Johns Hopkins University)
* Creative Evolution: Natural Selection and the Urge to Remix, edited by Mark Amerika (University of Colorado at Boulder)
* Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me: Open Science and its Discontents, edited by Gary Hall (Coventry University)
* Energy Connections:  Living Forces in Creative Inter/Intra-Action, edited by Manuela Rossini (td-net for Transdisciplinary Research, Switzerland)
* Human Genomics: From Hypothetical Genes to Biodigital Materialisations, edited by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex University)
* Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, edited by Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton)
* Nerves of Perception: Motor and Sensory Experience in Neuroscience, edited by Anna Munster (University of New South Wales)
* Neurofutures, edited by Timothy Lenoir (Duke University)
* Partial Life, edited by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (SymbioticA, University of Western Australia)
* Pharmacology, edited by Dave Boothroyd (University of Kent)
* Symbiosis, edited by Janneke Adema and Pete Woodbridge (Coventry University)
* Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities, edited by Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* The In/visible, edited by Clare Birchall (University of Kent)
* The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating, edited by Monika Bakke (University of Poznan)
* The Mediations of Consciousness, edited by Alberto López Cuenca (Universidad de las Américas, Puebla)
* Ubiquitous Surveillance, edited by David Parry (University of Texas at Dallas)
* Veterinary Science: Animals, Humans and Health, edited by Erica Fudge (Strathclyde University) and Clare Palmer (Texas A&M University)

W: http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

Open Humanities Press is a non-profit, international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org

Underneath the full program for this term. All be welcome!

- OPEN MEDIA -

A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms organized by Coventry University School of Art and Design, Department of Media and Communication. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.

Programme: November-December 2011

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November 1st:

William Merrin (University of Wales, Swansea) – ‘Open Sourcing Knowledge: Towards a University 2.0′ (Read More)

November 15th:

Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘Mediating Agriculture in the Age of “Open-Source”: Potential Contributions from Cultural Studies’

November 22th:

Living Books about Life launch (Coventry University, Goldsmiths, the University of Kent, and Open Humanities Press) – Talks by Clare Birchall (University of Kent), Gary Hall (Coventry University), Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London), Peter Woodbridge (Coventry University), and Janneke Adema (Coventry University).

December 6th:

Isis Hjorth (Oxford Internet Institute) – ‘Peer-production of culture: Independent film making in the Wreckamovie community’

December 13th 3:00-5:00 (at Meter Room - 58-64 Corporation Street, Coventry, West Midlands, CV11GF)

Round table on ‘Open Art, or What could Open Art mean?‘
Participants: Elly Clarke (Coventry University), Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins (Independent artists), Ruth Catlow(Furtherfield) and James Wallbank (Access Space Sheffield)

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When: 1:45-2:45 on selected Tuesdays in November and December (except the final round table, which will be held from 3:00-5:00)

Where: ICE, The Screening Room (except the final round table, which will be held at Meter Room)

Institute for Creative Enterprise (ICE)
Coventry University Enterprises
Puma Way, Coventry
CV1 2TT

All seminars are free to attend and open to all

For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx

How to get to ICE, see:

http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=&daddr=52.403937,-1.505545

All enquiries please contact:

Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk|
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections

Brian Dettmer

As mentioned before, as part of my remix contribution to Mark Amerika‘s project site accompanying his new volume Remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press) I will be blogging and tweeting on remixthebook.com during this week. Underneath the blog entry I submitted.

Scholarly Remix: Academia Reassessed

As part of my research practice I explore the potential of remix theory and remix practices to reexamine the basic notions underlying scholarship and scholarly communication. Many of our preconceptions concerning what merits authorship, authority, originality and so on get constructed within certain dominant discourses on what scholarship is and should be (mostly centered on upkeeping, conserving and repeating print-based notions in the digital realm). Remix practices, I believe, have the power to intervene in these constructions, to disrupt traditional discursive practices, and to both theoretically and performatively create new, experimental practices, based on sharing, openness, process and interaction. However, even in our experimental research practices we often end up repeating the established structures we try to critique, as we as scholars are massively embedded within a knowledge system that demands us to perform in a certain way and to adhere to the scholarly reputation economy. Yet I do believe that even small changes are important, like questioning the system as it is currently set up, and thinking about the values that we deem important in scholarship. A first step is to be aware of the fact that many of our preconceptions towards scholarship are constructions: constructions we can reconsider and change.

My research practice can be seen as my own attempt at reassessing scholarly communication, mostly through examining what the future of the book in scholarly communication can be (or should be) and by exploring what potential role remix practices can play in both scholarship and in the future of the book. The remix I made for remixtebook.com is part of my intervention, as is this blog entry and the tweets I will be sharing with you here. These will be contain some fragments of source material from my remix for remixthebook.com, combined with a selection of links and references I have collected over the years related to remix and scholarship. Finally at the end of the week I hope to be able to live-tweet The culture of Remix, the 2nd International Graduate Conference in Communication and Culture, which takes place in Lisbon on 13-14 October 2011, and promises to showcase some exciting new research on the multiple dimensions of remix.

Remix artist and author Mark Amerika recently launched his new book Remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press) together with a complimentary website of remixes based on material from remixthebook. From the blurb on the project site:

The remixthebook.com website is the online hub for the digital remixes of many of the theories generated in the print book and features the work of artists, creative writers and scholars for whom the practice and theory of remix art is central to their research interests. remixthebook author Mark Amerika, along with co-curator and artist Rick Silva, has invited over 25 contributing international artists, poets, and critical theorists, all of them interdisciplinary in their own practice-based research, to sample from remixthebook and manipulate the selected source material through their own artistic and theoretical filters.

I was fortunate enough to have been asked to contribute a remix to this project, which can be found online as part of the project website here, including a short artist’s statement.

Underneath you can find the text of my contribution. As part of my contribution I will also be blogging and tweeting on the remixthebook project site during the week of October 9th. So stay tuned for that. Thanks again to Mark Amerika for this opportunity to contribute to his project, and do check out all the amazing other remixes available here, for instance this Isarithm remix by Rick Silva and Woulg:

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CREATIVITY (Capital C) has been hijacked by the artists

Think of the scholar as a medium. Think of the scholar as a postproduction medium. What does it mean to be an avant-garde scholar tuning their instrument so that they can then BECOME something like a meta-medium? Remix theory takes the inherent properties and the possibilities of the new medium (the Internet) as its basics and not the properties of the specific media it incorporates or reflects upon (be they textual or sound- or image-based). In this regard, think of the scholar as a kind of remixological filter. Even THIS is a kind of generative remix performance where the scholar selectively samples from and filters or manipulates the data as a way to open up more creative potential. The power of remix lies in its selectivity, the filter it imposes, where the ‘author’ becomes a ‘remixer’, the remix an object of interaction. The philosophy of the remix is essentially ‘rhizomatic’, the methodology collaborative and processual, focused on the added value of the various media in the communication process. The remix as concept and practice is not new; new are the increased possibilities and the ease to share and recombine media in the digital environment in a collaborative manner. Notions of authority, originality and authenticity get challenged in remix theory, where the remix is a collaborative crowd effort, the reception point is only one part in the process of information and culture transmission and the producer becomes the consumer and vice versa.

One can observe however how over the course of history the media that scholars work with may change but the assortment of potential trajectories scholars follow tend to stay the same. This serves to show the strength, the reach and the impact notions of stability, authorship, and authority (echoing the rhetoric of printed publications) still have within the digital environment.  In reality, the authority of the author is thus not challenged. Does the Internet and its online social networking apparatus open up potentially new trajectories for scholars to “make history”? It already has … but not to the degree it still needs to in order to usher in a dramatic shift in the way we position both the scholar and the scholarly work in contemporary network culture. This serves to show how even in our explorations of the new medium, it is very hard to let go of the kind of essentialist notions that we have inherited from the rhetoric of print publications. There are some ‘knowledge practices’ we have adopted and grown accustomed to, such as authorship, stability and authority. Digital and online media offer the potential to increasingly critique these notions where thinking a knowledge system beyond these notions increasingly seems to become a practical reality. Remix is a liminal concept in this way; it stands on the border of these customary ways of thinking. It shakes them up. It poses a potential crisis.

Here’s a question: if we are all scholar-mediums, how do we trigger novel states of creativity? Remix Theory can be seen as a new way to critically think the potentiality of the book, as a way to think beyond the book, as a strategy to explore its multiple potentialities, to challenge established notions like stability, identity and materiality that are all bound up with (printed) books and at the same time with our current conception and practice of knowledge. Remix is a cultural and a political phenomenon, it can be seen as a resistance against essentialisms. It can be used as means to critique the essentialist doctrines at work within the Humanities. Remix Theory can be a framework to question issues of authorship, stability, authority and originality within these disciplines and within science at large, just as much as it has been a framework to question these in for example music, art and poetry. Finally, the way it mixes theory and practical methodology, and the way it mixes media can be seen as both a commentary on and an inspiration for the (digital) humanities. And although, as we have argued before, it does not fundamentally challenge or alter these concepts, it is a (necessary) step in the right direction, towards a more fluid conception of the humanities. Remix theory is a strategy to explore its multiplicities.

Scholars always have to develop and reconfigure their SENSE of measure over time. Exactly how DO scholars or hackers or creative remixers develop a sense of measure over time? The remix scholar whose sense of measure enables them to BECOME a postproduction medium sampling from the vocabulary of critical thought is what we would call A CONTEMPORARY THEORIST. By re-claiming creativity for the scholar as their birthright we can begin to open up the neural pathways to prophetic illumination.

We need new ways of expanding the narrative of the monograph in a ‘remixed’ manner or fashion. The stable form of the text-based version gets challenged by the input of ‘foreign’ elements, be they from other narratives, other voices or other discourses. For the contemporary writer as interdisciplinary media scholar the lyrical conceptual poetic narrative movements come in wildly assorted forms everything from dance to cinema to performance art to the scribbling of pen or pencil on paper. This enables the postproduction scholar to intuitively mirror the neuron activity of the ones who came before, something that feels like a deep interiorization of someone else’s creative rhythm mediumistically syncing with whatever filters one turns on at any given time during the remix performance. These elements are then inserted (or not really ‘inserted’ as they have increasingly been part of the creation process from the start) into the narration in a continual manner, melting together into a new never-ending ever-updateable ‘form’. We can also go beyond these categorizations, where there is the possibility to include all forms of experimentation in one ‘digital humanities project’ or ‘publication’: a web-based wiki-shaped networked narrative.

Will this be the future of digital scholarship in the Humanities? How would a contemporary remixologist divining their own just-in-time context for the compositional playing field of the moment jump-start a renewable tradition made out of all of the “renewable energy sources” (i.e. scholar-mediums) signaling from the past / present / future? All three forms of experimentation still offer the possibility to create or extract a ‘solid form’, a stable published text, whilst at the same time they give an increased insight into knowledge creation, into the process of Humanities scholarship and communication as it grows and forms and gathers strength and form. In this way these experiments form a beautiful bridge between product and process, between the old and the new, between print and digital, holding on to the best of the print past and the possibilities of the digital future. “How can artist-researchers developing new practice-based initiatives in remixology turn the immediate future into a renewable source of ‘energy’ that fuels their unconscious readiness potential?” Monographic experiments as a new monographic potentiality.

This is why remixthebook – which this composition samples from – is our attempt to cross-contaminate Process Theory with Creativity or creative class struggle — and believe us, if you are a contemporary scholar, no matter what your financial situation, you are suffering through creative class struggle. One of the things remixthebook plays with is how scholars use networked and mobile media technology to discover forms of writing that MAY introduce new patterns of meaning. The acknowledgment of the constructivist nature of stability urges us to conduct a closer analysis of the structures underlying our knowledge and communication system and how they are presently set-up. Just like stability, fluidity is an ideal type, just like openness, it is a rhetorical stance. Within an information environment it can be seen as a paradox; although information might flow, knowledge inherently needs some form of objectification or stability to be called knowledge. True liquidity is thus an impossibility, fluid knowledge is an impossibility, and, at least in our definition of the term, fluid texts are an impossibility. We can only ever achieve quasi-liquidity. This impossibility to achieve real liquidity should however not be seen as a failure, as it still has rhetorical power. As rhetoric it helps us deconstruct the structures of our object-oriented knowledge systems and it enables us to experiment with a way of thinking and practicing that (performatively) challenges these preconceptions and helps us to think and create them differently.

Unless you’re a fatalist, then we should at least consider the aesthetic functions of the scholar as remix performer. It’s important to keep in mind this idea of remix performance as a kind of structured improvisation, because it’s this “always live” PERFORMANCE that enables the remix scholar to ride the wave of intuition. Think of the remixologically inclined performance scholar as a novelty generator, someone who positions their aesthetically fit energy bursts as an intervening sense of measure to be reckoned with. Could we say that the contemporary scholar AS remixologist or provocateur of postproduction art, EMBODIES what it means to FEEL aesthetic? Let’s face it, scholars are always sampling and manipulating other scholars SENSE of measure and this is how they create a formal aesthetic over time. In remix theory the remix is seen as a process, an activity, a verb; it is a process of constantly renewing, building upon and modifying mediated and reworked cultural materials. In this process new creative work is produced: the remix. The remix occurs in a stratified structure, no longer linear but multilayered, hybrid and liquid. The remix is a collage, it combines various elements to build something new. Remixing is part of our digital culture, it is essential to our creativity and one of the main contemporary composing practices

For now we are still in the race but these scholars were the ones who taught us how to haunt the texts that came before us even as these same texts haunted us back. Memory is a form of context shaping, it determines the meaning we attribute to scholarship: we see a repetition of the past in the creation of the new. The mystery and unclear meaning of the texts is in this case what makes it meaningful to the viewer as interpreter, as ‘meaning-searcher’. As a practice-based remixologist filtering the meta-perturbations of Source Material Everywhere the scholar as postproduction medium choreographs an ongoing structural improvisation projected from the deep interior sense mechanisms of other scholar-agents autopoietically postproducing a novel togetherness that reconfigures the world into yet more renewable energy that doubles a source material seducing us into our next remixological becoming. The vacuum of meaning creates potential: it creates a space for interpretation and functions as a reflection of our search for patterns and meaning. It thus offers a meta level in a way, similar to what abstract art does: it is about the search for meaning, about wanting to discover the secret context and inherent patterns in the structure of the text, like in a way abstract art is a reflection on art itself. Patterns are the new real of our society. The visionary scholar always gyrating at pivotal locations throughout the narrative becomes a multitude of flux identities and transformations nomadically circulating within the networked space of flows. This idea of the content creator as the real medium, putting things on its head in a way, literally incorporating and mixing the different media into one single communication expression, in whatever format, could be a nice fit for thinking about what a post literate content producer should be able to do. Success in this area of practice-based research could lead to the scholar becoming a valuable postproduction medium running

… at full speed, in all directions, into the memory, into the future, into the data of the present, to grasp the unexpected, the luminous, stupefying, connections.

But let’s say that you are a “creative writer” or net scholar or live A/V performer or interdisciplinary “code-smith” who accesses all available source material to cobble together your new work of conceptual sculpture. This triggers the question: Is an object finished when it at the same time constitutes a building block for another object? How would we determine the variance of value for each of these outputs? How would we differentiate the stylistic tendencies of scholars who remixologically inhabit a multitude of multi-media forms of language and how would we measure the value of their work as postproduction mediums? Experiments with new way of conducting and publishing monographs in an open manner, like for instance via liquid books or wiki monographs, might be a first step away from an object-oriented approach focused on a finalized product, towards a publishing system based more on constant, collaborative and simultaneous knowledge production.

Joseph Esposito gives a nice overview of the different business models in use in scholarly communication in his blog post What We Talk About When We Talk About Business Models: A Bestiary of Revenue Streams. In this post he zooms in on revenue streams derived by publishers using traditional or ‘user-pays’ publishing, author-pays publishing, institutional sponsoring, marketing services, ‘freemium’ publishing and licensing. And, as he confirms, in many cases content is made available by the aid of a hybrid model, in which revenue streams from the different categories mentioned above get mixed up in various forms and models. In a later post entitled The Membership Business Model for Scholarly Communications, Esposito discusses another business model, one which I want to explore more deeply here, namely the one in which ‘a group of people working in the same area (the area does not have to be academic research) might decide that they have a shared interest in publishing some of their material. They thus pool their resources, appoint individuals to oversee the publications, establish policies, and make the material available to fellow members of the community.’

As Esposito states, this membership model is a good example of the above mentioned hybrid model, as it is a mixture of different economic models:

‘At first glance, the membership model appears to be a form of user-pays publishing, as access to content requires a fee.  But this model differs from the traditional one in its reciprocal nature: One fee provides access to both content (like the user-pays model) and to the publishing process itself (like the author-pays model). It’s thus very much a community model of publishing, where membership has its privileges.’

It’s the later two aspects described by Esposito that I am most interested in here, namely the concept of community and the idea of member privileges.  For the model I want to focus on here, the crowd-funding model—well known from popular platforms such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo—can be seen as a combination of the membership model and the Maecenas model I have written about before, but now targeted to the web. In this model the traditional ‘community model of publishing’ is being exported to the web and tried out in new forms and with a new, potentially global, community. At the moment this model is mainly being used in or experimented with in artistic and creative projects, but it has already been tried out extensively in other fields, media and formats too. The idea behind this model is that a community of people with an interest in (the funding of) a certain project, donate a small sum to support the project or to pledge for the project, in return for which they get ‘access’ to the project or gain certain ‘privileges’ (such as special previews, a copy of the final book/record/movie, a dedication in said media, or in some cases even a chance to go out for lunch with the artist).

My current aim is to explore in what way this model might work for academic book publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences, in specific in combination with an effort towards increasing accessibility and stimulating (Gold) Open Access publishing. However, before I go on to explore the different possibilities such a system might offer, note that I see the current proposal or set of ideas as an urgent necessity, a necessity to look for and experiment with new revenue streams and business models to help the specialized monograph survive, to make its creation and dissemination possible and to safeguard its existence. At the same time I see the ideas and possibilities explained and examined here as the nadir of what academic publishing has become, as an exemplar of the strains academic authors, publishers and their institutions have to go through to get their projects funded and their work published. Projects that society should deem important enough to fund from the outset, work that should be made accessible by default and not only when it is able to make a profit. The idea of crowd-funding a project or a publication in many ways reveals what the modern academic has become, spending increasing amounts of her/his/their ‘research time’ on securing internal or external funding, and on managing the paperwork that comes with that. The crowd-funding model, at least the one that is made popular by platforms like Kickstarter, might push the scholar to an even further extreme, were she/he/they will have to become a performer, playing out an act, juggling expertise, expected research outcomes, and promised deliverables in a snappy marketing video. All in order to persuade an already over-commercialized public to spend money on this specific, unique, and important project—instead of on one of the other hundreds of endangered publications—in a race for the competition of who can make the best promo clip.

An example of how this can become a bit ridiculous, or better said,  ‘problematic’, is sketched out by this recent article from The New York Times, that shows how, in order to obtain funding, two biologists ventured into selling t-shirts and trading cards in an effort dubbed by The Times similar to an ‘online bake sale’. The question is, are we headed towards a world in which scholars will increasingly have to become performers to obtain funding, for example by giving talks before paying audiences—which seems to be a growing trend—mimicking super-star scholarly authors such as Žižek? This trend is also visible in the increasingly popular format of the TED talks for instance (although TED does not pay its speakers, it is definitely a marketing device for authors). Will scholars be forced to go the same path literary authors have already gone, making money to finance their projects, publications and livelihoods by giving readings, signing books and selling merchandise? Increasingly it seems that in the present climate, with a lack of commercial interest for profit making, a lack of institutional backing, and a lack of (alternative) patronage systems in place in many of the countries hit by budget cuts, scholars, educators, authors and artists will have to go to drastic measures. Will this be the consequence of a society in which culture and scholarship are no longer seen as a necessity or as a public good? And aren’t we with that, as Žižek noted in a recent talk in London, killing of exactly those ‘traditional western standards and norms and values’ that the current right-wing European governments are at the same time craving to restore and maintain?

On the other hand, although the crowd-funding model showcases the extremes scholars have to go to nowadays to get money, it also offers many real possibilities. Against the gloomy vision sketched above, we should not underestimate the power of the community, and the self-organizing skills of the public sphere, when the commercial powers and the institutions that govern us increasingly abandon the Humanities and Social Sciences. Let’s get together with both our peers and with the wider community out there to discuss what we deem worthy research. Research that merits publication, research that deserves to be spread more widely.

So what is new about this crowd-funding model? As I stated before, it combines a membership model with a sponsorship model. In this way the statement made by Esposito that ‘a society that makes its content available through open access may experience declining interest among its members to continue paying membership dues’, underestimates the ideologies that trigger people, like for instance doing things for a common good, to support a certain charity or a certain goal—like increasing accessibility to scholarly publications. Furthermore the crowd-funding model finds a solution for another problem in the membership model Esposito notices, namely, as he states, ‘what, after all, is the point of being in a community unless it serves to define those who are outside it?’ The crowd-funding model no longer defines a community by giving it privileged access to the outcomes of the project—to the final publication—but to the process itself. It makes the community part of the process in a way. Crowd-funders thus become both member and part of a specific project (whilst attaining certain benefits at the same time). And this can very well go hand in hand with financing an openly available outcome at the same time. As the NYT article states ‘generosity — of the crowds will come to the rescue.’

One of the problems noted in the NYT article however is the lack of a review system with crowd-funded projects. With this they mean a lack of a peer review system by experts of course, as a crowd selection system is already part of the crowd-funding process. As the article states, ‘most crowd funding platforms thrive on transparency and a healthy dose of self-promotion but lack the safeguards and expert assessment of a traditional review process.’ However, peer review can of course take place at several stages during a project (for instance on acquiring funding, during the process of the project, during the publication phase and after the publication). These selection and quality assessment processes can be build into a crowd-funding model. Crowd-funding is just another revenue stream and needs not be without peer review or branding. A journal, publisher or a group of peer scientists can still endorse a project after or even before it has attained crowd-sourced funding. I think the problem these kind of new revenue models target has to do with the fact that projects that do measure up to quality and peer review standards, do not necessary have the funding to carry out these projects or to make the outcomes (openly) available. Competition has become harsh, and as Jean-Claude Guédon has showed us, the present system is mostly catering to let the best of scientific outcomes prevail. However, as Guédon also argues, the issue of excellence should not come to substitute quality thresholds.

The idea of crowd-sourcing funding for academic endeavors has already led to a few experimental platforms, of which the most promising might be the Italian Open Genius project, set up by Andrea Gaggioli. Open Genius, in adopting crowd-funding to scholarship, specifically focuses on the quality evaluation element. As Gaggioli and his colleague Riva write in a Science article here, ‘to assist (non-specialist) investors in deciding the awarding of contributions (and to audit thereafter), a peer-review procedure could be used. (…) Fraud could be prevented by implementing a reputation system (…) and by indicating the scientific track record of the proponent.’ As it states on its website, Open Genius is a not-for-profit initiative set up by the scientific community. It also lists it motives for using crowd-funding on its website and states it wants ‘to increase the resources for research, to reduce the gap between science and the public, to enhance transparency in funding allocation and use, and to inform donors about the results of their investments.’ The idea behind Open Genius is again that crowd-funding is seen as an additional revenue stream, where it looks to partner with similar academic, philanthropic or government funding initiatives. Their ideological background is also clear from their choice for open-source software and platforms. Ironically however, although the thinking behind this project seems solid, it hasn’t actually commenced yet, as it lacks the funds needed to start accepting proposals.

Where Open Genius is mostly focusing on funding whole (academic) projects, there are already some crowd-sourcing experiments up-and-running that focus more specifically on the funding of (literary) book publications. One of them is the Unbound Books platform, which works similar to Kickstarter but at the same time takes on a more traditional publishers role, as Unbound’s cofounder John Mitchinson states in an interview with Fast Company here: ‘we’re managing the back end in a way that Kickstarter doesn’t,” (…) “They’re a pure fundraising platform” (…)”We’re printing and distributing and finding the market for the books”. This publisher’s involvement has however led to forms of critique, as it is not a ‘pure’ crowd-sourcing project. Also, as is stated in this article by Bobbie Johnson, the problem with the Unbound Books model is that they got the underlying idea of ‘community’ wrong that seems to be essential when it comes to crowd-funding: the idea of ‘by the community and for the community’. As Johnson states: ‘It’s really about communities choosing their own destinies. As with crowdsourcing before it, there needs to be a real sense of involvement and authenticity if projects are to be about more than just doing things inexpensively.’

This idea of keeping traditional publishing functions alive whilst at the same time focusing more on the idea of community seems to be much better implemented in the Cursor platform set up by Richard Nash especially for book communities. The first community set up with Cursor is Red Lemonade. In an interview with Richard Nash by Digital Book World’s Rich Fahle, Nash states that Cursor is set up as a platform for publisher to also become membership organizations. Getting fans, writers and other interested parties to become members and comment upon each other’s work is the basis of the platform. The community then becomes the sole source of books to publish. In this way Nash’s project is more about ‘social publishing’, about the relationships between writers and readers. As Nash further states in this article in Publishers Weekly, ‘Cursor will establish a portfolio of self-reinforcing online membership communities’, a kind of ecosystem offering different publishing services.

These are all valuable insights and lessons to learn when thinking about applying a crowd-funding model to academic book publishing. One benefit of applying this model to academia is that the academic world already has a strong communal background in the form of disciplines and networks and formal and informal ties between publishers, authors, libraries, and journals (amongst others). And perhaps even more than in literary publishing, the writers of scholarly works are also the readers of these scholarly works. Furthermore, an elaborate communication and marketing network to keep up and strengthen the bonds between these communities is already in place in the form of mailing lists, blogs, (social) research platforms etc. And many of these digital platforms are from the outset already integrally connected to the rest of the web and the wider community of interest. Finally, as already mentioned above, the community ideology and the idea of sustaining and making accessible publications and research outcomes for the wider community fits in very well with Open Access principles and open source ideologies as they are at play within scholarly communication.

So, what could such a crowd-funding model for academic books look like? Underneath a very initial draft model.

First of all, as mentioned before, peer review and branding can very much be part of this model, as publishers or (groups of) authors can pre-select projects, endorse projects, or can conduct various forms of open and/or closed peer review as part of the project or publication process at different stages of its development. Also, crowd-funding can apply to already (traditionally) published and peer reviewed books, for instance to assist in making them openly accessible. A few different scenarios:

–      A book can be funded from its initial idea (more of a project fund in a way). Scholars can submit a proposal (a draft chapter, a promo video) plus a reward scheme for those who pledge a certain amount of money. For instance, funders could pledge 15 euro and receive a free paperback of the book (where students could get the same for only 10 euro). There could also be schemes for libraries, where they receive a print copy after pledging a certain sum.

–      Secondly, there could be an option to fund an Open Access edition of an already existing print book or of a book that will soon be available in print. At the moment projects like OAPEN.nl are looking into getting Open Access editions funded by government or funding institutions, by separating the costs of the Open Access edition from the costs of the printed edition. Another option, next to or instead of this institutional funding, could be to get the Open Access edition funded via crowd-sourcing.

–      Thirdly, the publication of a dissertation could be funded via crowd-sourcing platforms. Dissertations, although in most cases highly peer reviewed, are hard to get published at the moment due to their often highly specialized nature and the lack of build-up prestige of their authors (early-career scholars).

–     Fourth, if you fund a book you can get access to the way it develops. Following the idea of increased transparency or openness, crowd-funding could mean gaining access (for the funder or for the wider community) to the notes, updates, initial findings etc of the research project as it develops. This will draw the community closer towards a project and will also make them the initial pool of commentators (or even reviewers) of the document-in-development. Both authors and readers gain to profit from such a model, close to the ideas surrounding ‘social publishing’ as promoted by Nash.

A motion towards Open Access can be part of all these models, as an online version can be made available free for all—under a CC-license for instance—as a first requirement or outcome of all of these models. The community on which these models can be based, will first of all be made up of scholars in a certain field, but can be extended to students, libraries, other scholars in adjacent fields, the general public, companies (supporting publications as a charity cause for instance) etc. And again, different communities, and different projects, can exist on one platform.

It’s hard to say whether such a model might actually work, as much depends on, as said before, the willingness of a specific community to support projects and on the right model or platform. And again, although this might be just another revenue stream in that increasingly popular ‘hybrid model’ used to get publications funded, as long as it is working towards getting important and valuable research results out there, it is a shot worth taking.

James Bridle is a London-based publisher and an all-round creative person, who is involved in all kinds of book-shaped experiments. He finds himself in between and on the border of books, technologies of social reading, and literature. He, amongst others, devised the first book of Twitter, where he printed out his tweets in the form of a book. Bridle begins his talk by stating that there is a certain weight of expectation that people have concerning the physicality of the book. The physicality is what reveals the weight and cultural value given by people to a material object. What is it exactly that is so important about books, Bridle asks. Books exist in time. They exist through time. They are advertisements for themselves; you are immersed within the space of the reading process itself. You spend time with books and go on journeys. In this way books become the souvenir of their own experience. They are both a gift and the locus of more conversations around the book. The problem is, Bridle explains, that we have mistaken the temporality of the book for the physicality of the book. What we really care about is not about how books smell or feel in our hands. Ebooks create a cognitive difference because they don’t give the temporal qualities of the book: they are transient, they go away, and there is no way to enact temporal activities within them. This is starting to change though. Underlining, dog-earring, seeing your process as you go through the book; these instances of knowing where you are and of feeling that you are inside a book, in the space of a book, are being recreated online.

An important aspect of interaction with a book, Bridle states, is through making notes. Through note making we are in many ways doing something far more interesting with books. And we are encouraging people to have these interesting behaviors. However there are also weird behaviors around the book that we don’t talk about. For instance book guilt and the obsession of having to finish a book. Book fear, when you are unable to write in a book or book-ear. This is something that we can change however, Bridle states. We can now encode the totality of the reading experience. We can capture and engage with an archive. This is social reading, Bridle explains, something that provides a lasting and shareable experience. You can either keep them for yourself or share your thoughts. Bridle set up Open Bookmarks, to encourage certain behaviors, and to encourage best practices. Social reading is a great opportunity for publishers, according to Bridle, this is the direction publishing will be going into. Music wants to be recorded and almost all music is recorded. This is starting to happen with books too: books are subliming; they are going up in the air. But we need to keep our experiences intact and this is what publishers need to be involved in. Because this is where literature is going, and this is where the reader’s experience is going.

Nicholas Spice is the publisher of the London Review of Books, a literary magazine, tabloid, with an improved newsprint which appears twice a month. It has about 100.000 readers worldwide. They publish long-form essays on books and what comes out of these books. Spice explains how digital publishing has changed things much for the LRB, it for instance drastically changed the economics of distribution. The traditional distribution chain has been very inefficient, Spice explains. For literary books/magazines it has always been very hard to create readerships, as adverts and reviews are very hard to arrange. Bookselling is a very inefficient way of getting books to the public. High quality literature in the 1980s still had the same reach as it had in the 18^th century. The old system was thus immensely inefficient. The change, according to Spice, has to do with the fact that at the LRB they don’t have to print and distribute anymore in order to reach the audience. People come to find them and find them naturally through search engines (instead of they finding them). The content sells itself; it has become an advert for itself. Also the form has hanged. Online the form has disaggregated; people don’t have to read the whole magazine anymore. This has changed the way people engage with the magazine. The output produced by the LRB has become both more and less ephemeral. Everything has now come to the surface; the whole history of the LRB is now online. The average time spend on the website is two minutes and that is quite good. But it is two hours on average with the physical form. The question is, can the LRB survive and flourish in this way? We are attracting very many new readers, Spice states. But the nature of the things and the mode of engagement with the reader have changed. New forms of creativity and literary production are coming up. One of them is the handling of critique and evaluation by the reader, instead of by critics themselves. Will the LRB be welcomed in this world in the long term? The difficulty is that it is an exclusive medium, not an inclusive one. It is the magazine to be in because it knows what to keep out. Editors and staff are sifting out everything. Complexity, difficulty, and things that take time and rarely succeed: that is the LRB. And it takes time: the editing, the writing, and the reading. Even the letters to the editors are heavily edited. The LRB is very continuous with the main trust of intellectual endeavor since the start of civilization. It has taken years of practice to create objects of intense complexity and interest to the people who want these. Spice does not want to defend this tradition, but this has been what our civilization has been about: the philosophy of the book as being of supreme importance to us. We overestimate, romanticize, and fetishize certain things: the openness of form over completed things, fragmentation over linearity, the draft over what is finished, the spontaneous over what is considered. You can already find these tendencies back in the romantic age: the overvaluation of the social over the solitude. There is a fetishization of real-time over artificial time, Spice states. What happens spontaneously is supposed to be better than long form and contemplation. Is that adding value to the thing itself, Spice asks? Do these things add value to the text, the richness of the text? Is the real conflation to be found between information and the information chain and what we do with that information? What we make out of it to create value is necessarily slow. And the LRB is inherently dedicated to that tradition. Two main questions remain for Spice: can the LRB survive in that world? And, will this new environment be capable of breaking down the tradition of creating works against real-time?

Simon Worthington is one of the founders of Mute, which he started up 17 years ago together with Pauline van Mourik Broekman. Mute is published as a magazine (biannually). As Worthington states, they have always been experimenters in their long history of publishing. Worthington describes the present situation in the publishing world as a slow motion train rack. All these massively disruptive things are going on: the competition market, capitalism, the supposed long-tail and the long-tail of labor… Because of this situation, Mute has always been changing their publishing models. They are both a journal and a critical group in that area, always with a small public and in that sense always in a crisis. Mute started up with the web, in 1994. Their approach has always been free to share; they put all their stuff up online to support interaction with their readers. Their model is based on subscriptions and/or on buying print objects. In 2005 they moved into POD. This was an important change for the value chain and for how things move along, the quality of POD has improved and if needed they print in small runs and they can print internationally, without shipping costs, made possible by companies like Lightning Source.

They also work as a technologist group, making tools. At the moment for instance they are working on a project on e-conversion systems. They have been working in the open source community for a very long time. Their main problem has always been how to sustain a project. They have been trying to find ways to recompense themselves. POD did help a bit with distribution and costs in this respect, Worthington claims. If you have a commitment to free and open, the people at Mute look upon epublishing as the way to go. Looking at the tools that are there however, they decided that they do not all fit to their purposes, so they decided to make their own tools.

Worthington goes on to reflect upon the perceived anxiety about technology and its disruptivity on reading and on the fear of losing the book. He thinks this is a misplaced anxiety. These anxieties are better seen as the effects of global capitalism: that is why bookshops are closing. The return on profit is not high enough within retailing. The larger publishing industry has been a succession of buy-outs towards the creation of a global supply chain. Only the last few years ebooks have become a real thing. What is the trend now? It is a global supply chain. These kinds of pressures have been destroying the small bookshops and independent publishing.

Mute is a small publication, via ebooks and html5 they create things the reader wants to buy. But according to Worthington the future will be controlled by the Apples and Amazons of this world. It will be a vertical model, a capitalist control market. The securing of that market and the holding on to walled gardens is another example of the train-rack. In this situation you don’t know who your customers are anymore and they charge you 30% for controlling the market. These forces are much stronger than the changes in our reading habits etc.

Coming back to smaller publications, Worthington asks how they can be run. They are all nodes in a network of critical and cultural writers. The Eurozine conference reflected on the same issues, how to create a relationship with your audience that isn’t just about reading but about creating something like sustainability. This is very hard to do in a situation where in the UK the top ten publishers control 70% of the market. Donations and things like flat rates wont work they just don’t have the reach. Flat rates and state taxation will never happen and the market does not really welcome smaller publications. It is a hard nut to crack. For Mute, Worthington concludes, at the moment it is the combination of ebooks, html5 presentations and experiments with social reading that do it. But the situation stays precarious.

Questions

How will we be able to sustain the educational and quality aspect of publishing with so much trash and information around?

Simon: The web is dominated by brands. In that way the web mirrors the world we live in very closely. If that is publishing it seems to continue online

Nicholas: Cultural leaders will decide what is quality together. A large circulation of the LRB is always bums on seats and the internet makes that process more intensive.

James: We are going towards an editorship of crowds. Not that we are moving away from experts, but books have always been about recommendations to your friends and now they are just moving to the web. Access and filtering is something publishers have always done and it will increase this role online.

Simon: We need the disruption of the web: why does the meme exist? you need to break these things apart. In the UK the fixed book price disappeared and this has made the book industry and the retail industry collapse with the rise if the amazons etc. Localized variety will be destroyed by global apps and amazons.

How can we promote a culture of solitude? How do you envision that, what could be a next step?

Nicholas: We shouldn’t make the mistake of conflating two sorts of benefit and value. One of the best things of new media is the way it has facilitated contact between people, not only in virtual space but also in physical space, for instance with the LRB bookshop. This was impossible in the old system; you could not reach the people economically. But this is a benefit that has to do with social organization; it has nothing to do with the content and the value of the content and the things that are discussed. I think here solitude is very important. People can write books together but obviously they don’t do it. You cannot produce interesting thoughts quickly; you need to think them out. More than simple blogosphere blatter, we are talking about solitude and time. The evidence is not very strong that the content and value of what is being said is very high.

James: There is a huge conflation here with the social aspect. A blog doesn’t involve comments explicitly. Like everything it can be written solitary too, it is a tool. In the way we build these tools, it is very important to look at the way we use them. Open Bookmarks was also designed to read solitary. I want to see a shift in our emphasis on what these technologies can do to the reader. We can use these tools to create new experiences, almost all on the reader’s side. They can be valuable for them on the solitary side though; we should not force the social in them.

Bob Stein: These are all beautiful statements on all of the best things of print culture (akin to  Sven Birkert). I don’t want to fight against that and I don’t design things that force people in a certain direction. It is however another thing altogether to want to figure out what the affordances of these new technologies are all about. For me the age of the individual is coming to an end, the way we are judged etc like this. Will these technologies lead to new societies? I want tot put it in the context of how deep the shift will be from print culture to digital culture

Nicholas: I think it would be wonderful that the individual would be less important, but I am more of a pessimist. I don’t see factual evidence of that changing and of the evidence of technology on changing people that much.

Simon: We need to look at the context of the whole media spectrum: it is about different ideas being in circulation. These experiments need to be run. You want to see what happens when more people write and explore ideas.

The ghost of the author is all around you. Shouldn’t we be cautious of sucking authors into the entertainment industry?

Nicholas: Authors are already part of an entertainment industry. The interesting thing is how the egos of authors will deal with the dispersion of their reputation. As Freud said, we write because of fame, money, and the love of women. The question is, how to get your thrills in the digital age?

James: Authors as performers is something that is not comfortable for me. Yes they have always doing this to some extent. I think we should provide authors with tools that support them. Writing is not such a solitary attitude; authors exist as parts of much larger networks and discussions. The world is what I am writing about so I am in the world when I am writing about it. The writer is also of the network. We are building these huge dichotomies of the web as social and the offline world as non-social and this is not helpful.

We have been discussing the social mob and the solitary individual. But what about the small team or group? If you take out the global industries, what the world looks like is small bands of groups of experts (publishers etc.) and small groups or experts of creators. They are still constrained groups, but not as large as society as large. There are expert bands on the one hand and technology bands on the other. Can we ask ourselves, can there be a way in the future for small expert groups to benefit from small groups of technologists? Blogging experts might also learn something from traditional experts. Can we combine expertise of all sorts on the one hand, and the social networked public knowledge on the other hand?

Simon: Small pockets and groups and the way they connect is very traditional and very physical sometimes. New tools need to be made, and some new kinds of practices need to come in place to let these groups know about each other.

Geert Lovink: We need to disassociate the book from the romanticized solitary author.

Last month I attended The Unbound Book conference, a three day gathering of experts on books, publishing and reading, to collaboratively explore the future of the book and the transformation of reading, publishing and learning. Belated I wrote out my notes on some of the most striking lectures, a mere add-on to the amazing documentation that already accompanies the conference, which can all be found on the conference website. Video recordings of all the sessions were made, and all the talks were also live-blogged by students of the MA in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. Their reports of the talks can be found here.

Henry Warwick, assistant professor in Communication Theory and Digital Media at Ryerson University, in Toronto, Ontario is an artist, composer and scientist. He talked about the growing ethical disconnect in academic publishing. Research has become unaffordable and access to knowledge has become problematic. This is all the more ironic in an age where the entire library of congress can be stored on 14 TB. A new community ideal of sharing texts can be found on websites such as Aaaaarg.org and on Avaxsearch.com, where you can basically search for everything. Aaaaarg also contains discussions and is in general more ‘refined’ as it focuses on theory texts. Their refinement is what cuts them out of normal piracy. However, Aaaaarg has moved location a few times already after take down notices and its sustainability is very fragile. The problem, Warwick states, is that the web is no longer resilient or rhizomatic, it is terribly precarious. Look for instance at Egypt where the government managed to shut down the web. Another development is that increasingly the web will become tiered, where you will have to pay to access certain content. Warwick proposes the Alexandria project, where the books available on Aaaaarg and similar sites will be stored on USB-sticks or hard drives. A hard drive is very subversive in this respect. It cannot be taken down and it has the potential to distribute the files to various offline and online locations. Challenges to this project are abundant too, due to proprietary file formats, the treat of DRM on hard drives, and the possibility of the development of draconic legal issues.

Alan Liu, Chair and Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, focused on the question of what defines a book. As he states, books on iTunes are not books, although they use the metaphor of the bookshelf. Many observers are skeptical about ebooks being books. Maybe we need to deconstruct and reconstruct ebooks to create new paradigms. The standard positive thesis is that printed books are books. There are, as Liu states, certain epistemological and cultural connotations underlying the book. According to Liu, a book is:

“A long form of attention intended for the permanent, standard and authoritative i.e. socially repeatable and valued communication of human thought and experience (usually through narrative, argumentative or other programmatic organizations of bound-together yet discrete textual, graphic, and haptic elements”

What has changed now are the cultural significances of the book in this time. Features that are emphasized now are long form of attention, permanent, standard, authoritative. Book historian Elisabeth Eisenstein wrote about the standardization and fixity of the book. Even people who are skeptical of these attributes still see them as attributes of the book.

Liu draws our attention to the focus on materiality within new book historical studies. Materiality is seen as historically situated and highly irregular. He paraphrases Peter Stallybrash on the navigation of the bible, a non-linear, hyper-referenced book. The codex and printed books were books of discontinuity. This is also the basis of Adrian Johns’ critique of Elisabeth Eisenstein: the printed book was very irregular. The physical book is thus no more long, standard or authorative as any other online form. The rhetoric focuses on the end of the book: the book is dying, it is heading towards a postmodern heath death into entropy: atomic bites. Reading is at risk, fewer and fewer people are reading books. The death of the bookstore is near. Books are becoming shorter; Liu calls this the phenomenon of the incredible shrinking book, mirroring a recent trend in online publishing. In a way we are going back to broadsides. On a microscale this is visible in for instance the WordPress plugin Commentpress, where books have become paragraph-sized, with their own crowd-sourced comments.

Liu states that he is not a skeptic where it concerns the future of the book in the digital age. That is, as long as we keep a clear idea of what a book might be. Books are seen as expressive and determinate. But this is a mix of reality and ideology. Media are not just expressive, or longue durée. Long durée socially are traditions, institutions etc. We construct an image of durable media forms. And the wish becomes reality: the book has become iconic for the identity of people as endurance. It is part of our cultural identity: the wish to endure in time and to extend in space. This is why the book and long forms of attention are important. Today we need long forms of attention to serve as images of collective consciousness.

Liu discusses several online book projects related to this idea, including William Gibson’s Agrippa book project. This is not a book, Liu states, as a material longue durée; it is a reality that the long-lasting representation of the book revolves around the book as a long swirl of public discourse, without the actual book actually existing. The book is a long-form of attention that we as a culture crave and which we need to find in the future. The book is a discourse; it is the whole discussion that evolves around it in a culture. The book is thus not a thing (physical book/ebook) but a long form of shared attention.

A video made for the Unbound Book conference by the Rietveld students Adrian Camenzind, Louisa Gagliardi and Lydia Sachse.

The session entitled The unbound book was introduced by Geert Lovink. He stated that this session would not look into the question of morals or into what we have lost or gained—the question of ethics—but that it will look beyond good and evil at the process of the unbinding of the book itself. The unbinding of the book as we witness it right now is very much part of the explosion of the amount of information and the related need to search and visualize this enormous amount of information.

The first speaker of this session was the Dutch/German media theorist Florian Cramer. Cramer started his talk off with David Stairs’ 1983 artist book entitled Boundless, an all-round spiral-bound book, hence an unopenable book. This book is emblematic for Cramer for the dialectics between the bound and the unbound book. Binding can be seen as the lowest common denominator of what a book is. Even if something is unbound it still has the negative reference to being bound. There is a distinction between being unbound and being boundless. There is both a spatial and a temporal dimension to this discussion. Binding keeps texts together over time. There are also examples of unstable books however. How does this relate to the subject of this session, asks Cramer? He states that in the introduction to this session the book is presented in a similar way, as one would describe the web. Within 5 years this hyperlinked, networked book will have disappeared because you won’t be able to read the social linkage around it anymore. Also, this description of the book as linked, interactive, and networked, is exactly the same as the one used 20 years ago by The Voyager Company to describe the interactive electronic book. Everything just has a strong sense of nostalgia to it according to Cramer. In 1995 there was a work called Book Unbound by John Cayley, based on Apple HyperCards. These can’t be played anymore. There was also a boom of multimedia books created for CD-ROM. Hardly any of that is still physically readable today. This early discourse surrounding electronic literature had its own discussions, but paradoxically, although it started already in the 1990s it has completely stagnated and still evolves around the same works and the same discussions. Why did it not expand? Are we back to square one and are we back to the time before the web came about, back to discussions on hypertext? Cramer asserted that the future of this kind of writing is not the book but the network. The form of the book remained rather conventional. Especially if you look at the change other media went through. For the book not much has changed the last 20 years. According to Cramer an electronic book culture has emerged but it is much different from what is described in the conference programme

It has come abound in the iTunes model (Amazon’s Kindle ebook store) vs. p2p network sharing (aaaaarg). Cramer compares it with the development of music. Music files haven’t become interactive, what has changed is that they are now being massively shared, what is shared however are simple audio files. What is being swapped on aaaarg are plain vanilla PDF and text files. Electronic books have moved from the codex to the computer file, which can be seen as a hybrid of the codex and the scroll. Developing a book as a software exploitation of it self is very expensive and it needs to be updated. It just does not scale. Epub and PDF works because it is not multimedia and linear.

No definition of the book is set in stone, Cramer remarks. However, the rise of the WWW as an ephemeral and unstable medium has reciprocally helped to make the book into a more stable entity. Also, unstable formats such as telephone books, maps and the news, were amongst the first to migrate to the web. Contemporary visual arts saw a similar development in the 90s: those who worked with unstable analog media firstly moved to the web and became the first web-artists. The current generation however sees a massive boom of printed artists books and zines, as a reaction to the commodification of commercialized social media. As Johanna Drucker has shown, amongst artists there has always been a profound realization for the book as a whole. For instance looks at some of the most (media) experimental books that you can imagine, such as Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Drucker states that in these kinds of experiments the binding becomes even more important. In order to remain artist books instead of book objects, a connection needs to remain with the form of the book. According to Cramer, Drucker’s notion of the book as a fixed and stable arrangement coincides perfectly with the technical definition of an epub. There is always a notion of linear order in an epub file. Ebooks are first of all offline media according to the print standard. They are read-only documents, no input files. And annotations are saved separately from the file. Ebooks are the textual siblings of mp3 files. Ebooks as we know them today are more restricted in their media use and media design than print books. You can for instance not port visual poetry to an ereader. Cramer states that this is a paradoxical development, where media richness is becoming the domain of print. Artist books are becoming a main- stream genre of graphic design. Print is becoming a boutique niche of materiality. All print books in the era of electronic publishing strive to be coffee table books, rare and erratic objects. Art schools are creating boutique collectibles as print books become like vinyl. On the other hand electronic books, Cramer claims, are the equivalent of the paperback book. They are anti-auratic. If ebooks become the cheap paperbacks of our time there is still an element of unbinding; not in a multimedia sense but in how mp3 has unbound record collections, not in the way that was envisioned in the hypertext discourse. As Cramer concludes, ebooks have led to books becoming transitory formats. Textz.com and aaaarg have led to books becoming like a collection and a database, like a portable library that you can bring with you.

In the same session Bob Stein, founder of the Voyager Company and director of The Institute for the Future of the Book, looked into the phenomenon of social reading. He starts off with quickly answering the questions asked to the session speakers in the introduction by Geert Lovink: do we herald the death of the individual author with the rise of collaborative writing? Stein’s answer: yes. Is a book is still a book once it gets connected to other information? Stein’s answer: yes. What role do editorial and technical standards continue to play? Stein’s answer: not much. Stein continues with examples of the expanded books he developed with the Voyager Company: Jurrassic Park, Annotated Alice and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe. Stein remarks he often gets questions on why they call it the Institute for the Future of the Book when clearly they are talking about other things than just books? Because we don’t have the words yet for what is coming next. Until that moment Stein will just keep changing the history of the book. He briefly goes through his own history within the publishing industry and how his conception of the book changed during that time. When Stein worked for Encyclopedia Britannica, the idea of what a book is kept haunting him. Conceptually the change for him came when he stopped thinking of the physical nature of the book and started thinking on how it was being used. In 1981 books were the only medium in which users were completely in control of how the medium is used (speed, time etc.). The user is completely in control of the way he reads the content; the encyclopedia was a user-driven media were other media were producer-driven. In the end though all of these media became user-driven. Today we can read a movie actively like we read a book.

Around 1996 Stein quit publishing to start thinking around the idea that we need to redefine what a book is and he set up The Institute for the Future of the Book. Stein sat around with a bunch of young people to think about new things such as experiments with Networked Books (McKenzie Wark). They challenged the hierarchy of print—with the author on top and the reader below—flattening it by putting reader comments right next to the text instead of below it. Commentpress was developed out of this. They also experimented with asynchronous reading groups.

These developments led to Stein seeing a book as a place. A place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate. According to Stein reading will increasingly take place in the browser, not in mobile apps or in proprietary non-browser based readers, which would be way too complicated. HTML5 offers many possibilities to create beautiful interactive books. That is why Stein devised the online platform for social reading called Social Book. With a group of colleagues he build an eco-system for publishing that sees books as places were people gather. Stein explains how Social Book distinguishes 4 flavors of social reading. Firstly having a conversation with people in the margin of a book. Secondly it means having access to all the comments other people made. Social also means extracting an experts comments, it is a guide through a book. Fourthly it offers interaction with the author(s).  Social thus means being able to engage with authors asynchronously or in real time inside the book.

Corinna Norrick looked in her paper at book destruction with a political background, more specifically at political children’s book publishing. The 1968 German student protests amongst others focused on a criticism of the educational system. Publishing house Rororo Rotfuchs started publishing a non-authoritarian democratic children’s books series, which aimed at demystifying the ‘good children’s book. Not only did they explore new types of content, but also new formats and new channels of distribution. Norrick shows how the toy or activity books published by Rotfuchs challenged the typical function of books: playfulness and creativity became the main aspects. Children were encouraged to cut up the books, for instance to create clothing for dolls or set up pop-up houses. Destroying books in this way served as a stimulus for the child’s creativity.

Adam Smyth from Birkbeck zoomed in on a specific kind of renaissance remix practice in his paper on cutting up bibles at Little Gidding. Smyth showed several examples of mechanical marginalia, namely scissors that left oxidation traces in folios. What were these destructive instruments doing inside books? Scissors were most likely owned by binders, but we must not forget, according to Smyth, that the act of reading in the Renaissance was often accompanied by the cutting up of books, with both scissor and knives, to create scrapbooks or commonplace books. Cutout pages were again glued in to create new books. Smyth shows how in this way reading and writing was accompanied by a third act: cutting. He explores this act of making books by cutting up books in the Renaissance by looking at the Bibles or harmonies of Little Gidding, which can be seen as radical interventions in the history of the book. Nicholas Ferrar, head of an Anglican religious community, which resided in Little Gidding, and his family created concordances or harmonies by cutting-up bibles. The intention of the bible cut-ups was to ‘harmonize’ the text. The Little Gidding’s harmonies can also be seen as early forms of collage were images were also cut-up and reworked into the narrative, adding pictorial enhancements to the textual re-shuffling. Interesting enough, Smyth explains, it was not the cutting up of texts that was challenging but exactly the use of images, where in 1630 these were seen as akin to Catholicism. This cutting out of pictures, dismantling and reordering them, can be seen as a form of iconoclasm. Boxes of images were kept and also parts of images were used. Interesting enough the actual cutting and pasting was done by Ferrar’s nieces. The effect of the harmonies as a whole is the tension between a striving for completeness vs. the cutting and pulling apart that is part of the collating. The creativity of these harmonies rests on the prior act of cutting parts. Smyth shows how these harmonies are a good example of the illusion of the fixity of print. He sees this development as a response to the printing press: the scrapbooks turned the printed books back into unique pieces. As Smyth explains, there is a lot of novelty and technical sophistication in these harmony productions but they also catch a lot of unease in early readers of these books, who took them to be printed in the ordinary way. The finished book was thus not yet the iconic thing it is today; it was not yet a fully established idea. Cutting up bibles was not a regressive act, only the use of images was seen as controversial. Cutting up the text could also have served as a memory device perhaps, to aid the learning off the text, becoming more familiar with it. Smyth ends by noting how the idea of authorship is very interesting in these works where Ferrar’s nieces did the actual cutting up. So if we talk about authorship we can state that the Little Gidding texts have been reworked by many hands.

Nicola Dale - Cuckoo Song (2004)

Several book artists discussed their work during the conference. Book artist Ross Birrell’s video ‘Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp’, in which he cuts in half and grates books on Duchamp, literally framed the conference as they were placed in angles behind the speakers. Birrell discussed several of his works focusing on book destruction. Amongst others he burned the complete works of Kafka, to reflect on the question whether burning Kafka is fairer to Kafka’s original wish.

Book artist Nicola Dale looked at the potential of book destruction and the book as an artist’s medium. Important in her work is that she sees her work not as destruction but as a transformation of books. As she reflected on her work ‘Cuckoo Song’, she explains how the work is about shifting knowledge in time and space and how it challenges questions of originality, authorship and repetition. As she states in her website about this work: ‘I read a large amount of British poetry, with the themes of originality, repetition and authorship in mind. I systematically took note of any quotations from the poems which dealt with these themes, and used them to construct an original poem.’ She also describes the making of her work ‘Down’, consisting of thousands of paper feathers made by hand from old maps. The work ‘A secret heliotropism’ is a reflection on Walter Benjamin, and on change in history.

Nicola Dale - A Secret Heliotropism (2006)

Bonnie Mak talked in her paper about how books are being destroyed as part of our continued digitization effort. Digitization also means the translation of material into a computer readable format. It remains unclear how this translation should be read. In the transition from codex to computer, Mak opts for viewing digitized books as palimpsests, erased and overwritten. One exists on top of the other, one is visible through the other. The digital reproduction is based on a relationship with the exemplar, the digitization and its exemplar occupy the same space. The digitization also shows how it imagines a manuscript. Within the digitization the idea of what a manuscript is, is embedded, and thus the digitization shapes the way the manuscript will be received and understood. Thus digitization leads to a reordering of classical texts and to how we understand the world as scholars. According to Mak we should be attentive to how these sources shape the past and the present. Digitized books are similar but different from their exemplars. Digital books can thus be seen as palimpsests of the present and the past. Mak stresses the fact that we should exploit digital resources while remaining critical of them.

Ariana Boussard-Reifel - Between the Lines (2007)

Book sculptures by Robert The

Brooke Palmieri talked about a different form of book destruction namely the disappearance of books within library archives. What happens if a book does not have an online library entrance? Palmieri calls this a silent form of destruction, a form of institutionalized destruction caused by cataloguing problems. The quiet destructiveness that haunts the archive is very much a historical property of the archive. The problem mainly occurs with entries that are hard to classify such as Robert Burtons’ commonplace notebooks: half print, half manuscript, which is a monster to classify. Palmieri shows how decisions made on an institutional level in this way leave their imprints on scholarship. She talks about two kinds of destruction in this manner: duplicates that get destroyed and books that librarians forget to archive. This shows that when a book enters a library it is not at all guaranteed a life of rest. Even more, its nature seems very much malleable. Books get new call numbers, are replaced to different positions in the catalogue. The history of anomalies and distribution of books across libraries shows how librarians are an obstacle to the field, as they abide to cataloguing practices that do not know how to deal with anomalies and in which they keep re-shuffling the entries. Palmieri concludes that cataloguing standards are very much a product of historical circumstances.

Kate Flint, in her plenary talk ‘The aesthetics of book destruction’ reflects back on how a book destroyed can be a beautiful thing. Looking over several examples of book art she explores how these works raise important questions: what is lost when a book is destroyed and what possibilities arrive? What is the relationship between material form and content? Why do images of destroyed book have a certain emotional effect? Flint concludes that we should use the book to think about the future of the book. This includes questions of accessibility, archiving and preservation. These art books and book arts make us aware of a books materiality and the difference between a book and a text and of the reading experience of a book.

Paper sculpture by Cara Barer

Full circle with Open Access Monographs

When I look at publishing academic books in Open Access, the story surrounding it tends to go a full circle, starting and ending with technology.

Technology is disrupting. Publishing in Open Access could only become an option because information technology enabled us to create files in a format – PDF – that could be used for printing and also be widely read on a screen. And the Web made it possible to publish those files without a lot of hassle. It made it possible to think about books that are free as in beer.

Of course, technology did not stop there. Apart from the ‘traditional’ web channel, we can access content from a mobile device. The number of available channels is not just increasing for the readers; those who make OA monographs available can now use several platforms such as repositories, the Google Books or other platforms like OAPEN[1]. Using the right channels also influences the availability: will my precious books be found in all the search engines?

Technology may also be changing our definition of what a monograph actually is. When you add moving pictures, sounds, complete databases, is it still a book? When it is updated regularly, possibly as a result of an online collaboration, can we still speak of a monograph? Some may also question the academic status of a monograph, compared to articles. Books are too long to read, too slow to write. Or maybe not. Personally I do believe that monographs have merit, and that making them freely available is beneficial.

But how beneficial are they, and for who? This is something that I would like to explore a little further in the future. Open Access monographs may have a scientific impact, as barriers are removed. Pricing barriers may be important for scholars in developing countries. Full access may enhance research, by making the contents fully searchable. Making monographs accessible may help to carry their ideas to places beyond the academic circles. All this may happen right now, but on what scale? Open Access should not be just a believe system, it must be backed up with facts.

This leads to another question that is much easier to answer. How can Open Access be sustained? That is simple: through money and power. Funders of research can also fund Open Access publishing of the results. Libraries and publishers could adjust the way they operate; universities could mandate that all research must be made freely available. Sustainability also means that the digital monographs must be preserved, which is a technical issue. So this story ends where it started: technology.

If you like, you can look at a more visual representation underneath or here.