Notes on Unbound Books – A Conference Report (Part I)

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.

Poetry and Audio Cassettes as Vehicles for Social Change. On the Film Men Of Words by Johanne Haaber Ihle

Johanne Haaber Ihle graduated this fall from the MA program in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester with the stunning documentary Men of Words on the topic of Yemenite poetry. Packed in a burqa and carrying a camera (so I have been told), Ihle traveled into the vast mountains of Southern Yemen to the area of Yafi’ to record an ancient Yemenite tradition: a gathering of men, of poets, discussing and reflecting on current issues, politics, economics, social conditions and the local news and going ones via poetry. Clinging strongly to ancient oral traditions, at the same time the global media and communication streams have not gone unnoticed, even here in the localized context of Southern Yemen. Remarkable though – though not so remarkable as you first might think, as shall be explained later on – is that, in the light of increasing digitization and online media participation, the preferred means of recording and spreading these poetic discourses and reflections for Yemenite poets is the audio cassette. The specific media attributes of the cassette tape makes them into a strong moral weapon and communication and distribution device in a context of political and religious suppression and censorship.

As Ihle shows in her film, since the unification in 1990 of North and South Yemen, the country has been politically unstable. Poetry fulfills a very important function in the barren rural landscape, where illiteracy reigns and where television and radio (let alone the Internet) have not yet gained (much to any) ground. This is (next to the roughness of the mountains) due to socio-economic circumstances, but most of all due to political and religious conditions. For the rise of mass media has lead to fierce resistance from the side of the Muslim authorities (and amongst others to satellite dishes being shot of roofs as you can read here).

Ihle’s documentary is for a large part based on the book The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen by Flagg Miller, who gives an amazing analysis of the political and moral mediation practices that are at play in contemporary Arab poetry in a glocalized context. The book can almost in its entirety be read online at Google books here.

Ihle’s documentary focuses on the whole production or publishing process of Yemenite poetry, starting with the local context (the drought that plagued the farmers in Yafi’ last summer) and then going on to reflect upon the apprehension of this theme into poems during the gatherings. She then interviews one of the poets, who explains how the process further continues: the poet will write down his poem (often in response to another poet) and fax his poem to the other poet and/or to a singer, who will then send it back recorded on cassette. The cassette is then send to the shopkeeper. The poet does not make any money in this process, as Ihle lets the poet explain; poetry is a hobby, something one does next to their work and family life (the singer will however get paid a little by the poet). The film then shifts to Aden where Ihle goes on to interview an audio cassette shopkeeper, who explains that he holds a large collection of original tapes which are not for sale. He copies them and then sells the copies in his shop, where the customers can also listen to the cassettes. The shopkeeper is thus the first to profit from the poetry in this system. As the shopkeeper states, these cassettes, or better said the content on these cassettes, then spreads rapidly through pirated copies all over the Arab world and even beyond.

Ihle shows in her film how poets and both their recorded and oral poetry play an important role in Yemenite society: a poet reflects the public opinion. Where, as explained in the documentary, in the seventies love poetry was most popular, now poetry about current issues is preferred. Using cassettes offers a political medium to poets to spread their message and their commentary on the situation in Yemen. They are cheap and easy to copy and distribute. In this way cassettes play an important empowering role and function as vehicles for social change, giving poets an arena to reflect their opinions upon in an otherwise closed down public sphere dominated by controlled official media channels. Cassettes are a necessity in an environment where other new media, due to specific local circumstances and characteristics, not yet seem to have fully broken through. The cassette’s salient features thus form a bridge between the local orality and the global conversation. The use and mixing of different media in and for different contexts also becomes clear in Ihle’s documentary where in a few shots you see the poets filming each other with the cameras on their mobile phones during their recitations. 

Screenshot from Men of Words

The beauty and power of Men of Words lies in the fact that it not only gives you a short glimpse into the Yemenite society, environment and landscape, it also takes you on a tour into the world of Arabian Poetry, letting the different participants – the poet and the other people involved (the farmer, the poet’s peers, the shopkeeper and the client) – talk for themselves, explaining the process of poetry production and consumption and the strong role the oral tradition still plays in this respect. Ihle captured this process in a clear and coherent story, doing an excellent job on a subject that is difficult to get close to (especially being a foreign woman with a camera in a male-dominated Arab environment).

If you are interested in seeing Johanne’s film online, or want to get more information, you can drop her a line at johanneihle[at]hotmail[dot]com. She has been screening Men of Words in Copenhagen and Berlin and will be showing it in Cambridge this Thursday, December 17th. You can find more information about this screening here.

Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing

“But as I say, let’s play a game of science fiction and imagine for a moment: what would it be like if it were possible to have an academic equivalent to the peer-to-peer file sharing practices associated with Napster, eMule, and BitTorrent, something dealing with written texts rather than music? What would the consequences be for the way in which scholarly research is conceived, communicated, acquired, exchanged, practiced, and understood?”

Gary Hall – Digitize this book! (2008)

Ubu web was founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith and has developed from ‘a repository for visual, concrete and (later) sound poetry, to a site that ‘embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its parameters continue to expand in all directions.’ As Wikipedia states, Ubu is non-commercial and operates on a gift economy. All the same – by forming an amazing resource and repository for the avant-garde movement, and by offering and hosting these works on its platform, Ubu is violating copyright laws. As they state however: ‘should something return to print, we will remove it from our site immediately. Also, should an artist find their material posted on UbuWeb without permission and wants it removed, please let us know. However, most of the time, we find artists are thrilled to find their work cared for and displayed in a sympathetic context. As always, we welcome more work from existing artists on site.’

Where in the more affluent and popular media realms of block buster movies and pop music the Piratebay and other download sites (or p2p networks) like Mininova are being sued and charged with copyright infringement, the major powers to be seem to turn a blind eye when it comes to Ubu and many other resource sites online that offer digital versions of hard-to-get-by materials ranging from books to documentaries.

This is and has not always been the case: in 2002 Sebastian Lütgert from Berlin/New York was sued by the “Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur” for putting online two downloadable texts from Theodor W. Adorno on his website textz.com, an underground archive for Literature. According to this Indymedia interview with Lütgert, textz.com was referred to as ‘the Napster for books’ offering about 700 titles, focusing on, as Lütgert states ‘Theorie, Romane, Science-Fiction, Situationisten, Kino, Franzosen, Douglas Adams, Kritische Theorie, Netzkritik usw’.

The interview becomes even more interesting when Lütgert remarks that one can still easily download both Adorno texts without much ado if one wants to. This leads to the bigger question of the real reasons underlying the charge against textz.com; why was textz.com sued? As Lütgert says in the interview: “Das kann man sowieso [when referring to the still available Adorno texts]. Aber es gibt schon lange einen klaren Unterschied zwischen offener Verfügbarkeit und dem Untergrund. Man kann die freie Verbreitung von Inhalten nicht unterbinden, aber man scheint verhindern zu wollen dass dies allzu offen und selbstverständlich geschieht. Das ist es was sie stört.”

But how can something be truly underground in an online environment whilst still trying to spread or disseminate texts as widely as possible? This seems to be the paradox of many – not quite legal and/or copyright protected – resource sharing and collecting communities and platforms nowadays. However, multiple scenario’s are available to evade this dilemma: by being frankly open about the ‘status’ of the content on offer, as Ubu does, or by using little ‘tricks’ like an easy website registration, classifying oneself as a reading group, or by relieving oneself from responsibility by stating that one is only aggregating sources from elsewhere (linking) and not hosting the content on its own website or blog. One can also state the offered texts or multimedia files form a special issue or collection of resources, emphasizing their educational and not-for-profit value.

Most of the ‘underground’ text and content sharing communities seem to follow the concept of (the inevitability of) ‘information wants to be free’, especially on the Internet. As Lütgert States: “Und vor allem sind die über Walter Benjamin nicht im Bilde, der das gleiche Problem der Reproduzierbarkeit von Werken aller Art schon zu Beginn des letzten Jahrhunderts vor sich hatte und erkannt hat: die Massen haben das Recht, sich das alles wieder anzueignen. Sie haben das Recht zu kopieren, und das Recht, kopiert zu werden. Jedenfalls ist das eine ganz schön ungemütliche Situation, dass dessen Nachlass jetzt von solch einem Bürokraten verwaltet wird. A: Glaubst Du es ist überhaupt legitim intellektuellen Inhalt zu “besitzen”? Oder Eigentümer davon zu sein? S: Es ist *unmöglich*. “Geistiges” Irgendwas verbreitet sich immer weiter. Reemtsmas Vorfahren wären nie von den Bäumen runtergekommen oder aus dem Morast rausgekrochen, wenn sich “geistiges” Irgendwas nicht verbreitet hätte.”

What seems to be increasingly obvious, as the interview also states, is that one can find virtually all Ebooks and texts one needs via p2p networks and other file sharing community’s (the true Darknet in a way) – more and more people are offering (and asking for!) selections of texts and books (including the ones by Adorno) on openly available websites and blogs, or they are scanning them and offering them for (educational) use on their domains. Although the Internet is mostly known for the pirating and dissemination of pirated movies and music, copyright protected textual content has (of course) always been spread too. But with the rise of ‘born digital’ text content, and with the help of massive digitization efforts like Google Books (and accompanying Google Books download tools) accompanied by the appearance of better (and cheaper) scanning equipment, the movement of ‘openly’ spreading (pirated) texts (whether or not focusing on education and ‘fair use’) seems to be growing fast.

The direct harm (to both the producers and their publishers) of the free online availability of (in copyright) texts is also maybe less clear than for instance with music and films. Many feel texts and books will still be preferred to be read in print, making the online and free availability of text nothing more than a marketing tool for the sales of the printed version. Once discovered, those truly interested will find and buy the print book. Also more than with music and film, it is felt essential to share information, as a cultural good and right, to prevent censorship and to improve society.

This is one of the reasons the Open Access movement for scientific research has been initiated. But where the amount of people and institutions supportive of this movement is gradually growing (especially where it concerns articles and journals in the Sciences), the spread concerning Open Access (or even digital availability) of monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences (of which the majority of the resources on offer in the underground text sharing communities consists) has only just started.

This has lead to a situation in which some have decided that change is not coming fast enough. Instead of waiting for this utopian Open Access future to come gradually about, they are actively spreading, copying, scanning and pirating scholarly texts/monographs online. Although many times accompanied by lengthy disclaimers about why they are violating copyright (to make the content more widely accessible for one), many state they will take down the content if asked. Following the copyleft movement, what has in a way thus arisen is a more ‘progressive’ or radical branch of the Open Access movement. The people who spread these texts deem it inevitable they will be online eventually, they are just speeding up the process. As Lütgert states: ‘The desire of an increasingly larger section of the population to 100-percent of information is irreversible. The only way there can be slowed down in the worst case, but not be stopped.

Still we have not yet answered the question of why publishers (and their pirated authors) are not more upset about these kinds of websites and platforms. It is not a simple question of them not being aware that these kind of textual disseminations are occurring. As mentioned before, the harm to producers (scholars) and their publishers (in Humanities and Social Sciences mainly Not-For-Profit University Presses) is less clear. First of all, their main customers are libraries (compare this to the software business model: free for the consumer, companies pay), who are still buying the legal content and mostly follow the policy of buying either print or both print and ebook, so there are no lost sales there for the publishers. Next to that it is not certain that the piracy is harming sales. Unlike in literary publishing, the authors (academics) are already paid and do not loose money (very little maybe in royalties) from the online availability. Perhaps some publishers also see the Open Access movement as something inevitably growing and they thus don’t see the urge to step up or organize a collaborative effort against scholarly text piracy (where most of the presses also lack the scale to initiate this). Whereas there has been some more upsurge and worries about textbook piracy (since this is of course the area where individual consumers – students – do directly buy the material) and websites like Scribd, this mostly has to do with the fact that these kind of platforms also host non-scholarly content and actively promote the uploading of texts (where many of the text ‘sharing’ platforms merely offer downloading facilities). In the case of Scribd the size of the platform (or the amount of content available on the platform) also has caused concerns and much media coverage.

All of this gives a lot of potential power to text sharing communities, and I guess they know this. Only authors might be directly upset (especially famous ones gathering a lot of royalties on their work) or in the case of Lütgert, their beneficiaries, who still do see a lot of money coming directly from individual customers.

Still, it is not only the lack of fear of possible retaliations that is feeding the upsurge of text sharing communities. There is a strong ideological commitment to the inherent good of these developments, and a moral and political strive towards institutional and societal change when it comes to knowledge production and dissemination.

As Adrian Johns states in his article Piracy as a business force, ‘today’s pirate philosophy is a moral philosophy through and through’. As Jonas Andersson states, the idea of piracy has mostly lost its negative connotations in these communities and is seen as a positive development, where these movements ‘have begun to appear less as a reactive force (i.e. ‘breaking the rules’) and more as a proactive one (‘setting the rules’). Rather than complain about the conservatism of established forms of distribution they simply create new, alternative ones.’ Although Andersson states this kind of activism is mostly occasional, it can be seen expressed clearly in the texts accompanying the text sharing sites and blogs. However, copyright is perhaps so much an issue on most of these sites (where it is on some of them), as it is something that seems to be simply ignored for the larger good of aggregating and sharing resources on the web. As is stated clearly for instance in an interview with Sean Dockray, who maintains AAAARG:

“The project wasn’t about criticizing institutions, copyright, authority, and so on. It was simply about sharing knowledge. This wasn’t as general as it sounds; I mean literally the sharing of knowledge between various individuals and groups that I was in correspondence with at the time but who weren’t necessarily in correspondence with each other.”

Back to Lütgert. The files from textz.com have been saved and are still accessible via The Internet Archive Wayback Machine. In the case of textz.com, these files contain ’typed out text’, so no scanned contents or PDF’s. Textz.com (or better said its shadow or mirror) offers an amazing collection of texts, including artists statements/manifestos and screenplays from for instance David Lynch.

The text sharing community has evolved and now knows many players. Two other large members in this kind of ‘pirate theory base network’ (although – and I have to make that clear! – they offer many (and even mostly) legal and out of copyright texts), still active today, are Monoskop/Burundi and AAAARG.ORG. These kinds of platforms all seem to disseminate (often even on a titular level) similar content, focusing mostly on Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Literary Theory, The Frankfurter Schule, Sociology/Social Theory, Psychology, Anthropology and Ethnography, Media Art and Studies, Music Theory, and critical and avant-garde writers like Kafka, Beckett, Burroughs, Joyce, Baudrillard, etc.etc.

Monoskop is, as they state, a collaborative wiki research on the social history of media art or a ‘living archive of writings on art, culture and media technology’. At the sitemap of their log, or under the categories section, you can browse their resources on genre: book, journal, e-zine, report, pamphlet etc. As I found here, Burundi originated in 2003 as a (Slovakian) media lab working between the arts, science and technologies, which spread out to a European city based cultural network; They even functioned as a press, publishing the Anthology of New Media Literature (in Slovak) in 2006, and they hosted media events and curated festivals. It dissolved in June 2005 although the Monoskop research wiki on media art, has continued to run since the dissolving of Burundi.

As is stated on their website, AAAARG is a conversation platform, or alternatively, a school, reading group or journal, maintained by Los Angeles artist Sean Dockray. In the true spirit of Critical Theory, its aim is to ‘develop critical discourse outside of an institutional framework’. Or even more beautiful said, it operates in the spaces in between: ‘But rather than thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.’ To be able to access the texts and resources that are being ‘discussed’ at AAAARG, you need to register, after which you will be able to browse the library. From this library, you can download resources, but you can also upload content. You can subscribe to their feed (RSS/XML) and like Monoskop, AAAARG.org also maintains a Twitter account on which updates are posted. The most interesting part though is the ‘extra’ functions the platform offers: after you have made an account, you can make your own collections, aggregations or issues out of the texts in the library or the texts you add. This offers an alternative (thematically ordered) way into the texts archived on the site. You also have the possibility to make comments or start a discussion on the texts. See for instance their elaborate discussion lists. The AAAARG community thus serves both as a sharing and feedback community and in this way operates in a true p2p fashion, in a way like p2p seemed originally intended. The difference being that AAAARG is not based on a distributed network of computers, but is based on one platform, to which registered users are able to upload a file (which is not the case on Monoskop for instance – only downloading here).

Via mercurunionhall, I found the image underneath which depicts AAAARG.ORG’s article index organized as a visual map, showing the connections between the different texts. This map was created and posted by AAAARG user john, according to mercurunionhall.

Where AAAArg.org focuses again on the text itself – typed out versions of books – Monoskop works with more modern versions of textual distribution: scanned versions or full ebooks/pdf’s with all the possibilities they offer, taking a lot of content from Google books or (Open Access) publishers’ websites. Monoskop also links back to the publishers’ websites or Google Books, for information about the books or texts (which again proves that the publishers should know about their activities). To download the text however, Monoskop links to Sharebee, keeping the actual text and the real downloading activity away from its platform.

Another part of the text sharing content consists of platforms offering documentaries and lectures (so multi-media content) online. One example of the last is the Discourse Notebook Archive, which describes itself as an effort which has as its main goal ‘to make available lectures in contemporary continental philosophy’ and is maintained by Todd Kesselman, a PhD Student at The New School for Social Research. Here you can find lectures from Badiou, Kristeva and Zizek (both audio and video) and lectures aggregated from the European Graduate School. Kesselman also links to resources on the web dealing with contemporary continental philosophy.

Society of Control is a website maintained by Stephan Dillemuth, an artist living and working in Munich, Germany, offering amongst others an overview of his work and scientific research. According to this interview conducted by Kristian Ø Dahl and Marit Flåtter his work is a response to the increased influence of the neo-liberal world order on education, creating a culture industry that is more than often driven by commercial interests. He asks the question ‘How can dissidence grow in the blind spots of the ‘society of control’ and articulate itself?’ His website, the Society of Control is, as he states, ‘an independent organization whose profits are entirely devoted to research into truth and meaning.’

Society of Control has a library section which contains works from some of the biggest thinkers of the twentieth century: Baudrillard, Adorno, Debord, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Habermas, Sloterdijk und so weiter, and so much more, a lot in German, and all ‘typed out’ texts. The library section offers a direct search function, a category function and a a-z browse function. Dillemuth states that he offers this material under fair use, focusing on not for profit, freedom of information and the maintenance of freedom of speech and information and making information accessible to all:

“The Societyofcontrol website site contains information gathered from many different sources. We see the internet as public domain necessary for the free flow and exchange of information. However, some of these materials contained in this site maybe claimed to be copyrighted by various unknown persons. They will be removed at the copyright holder’s request within a reasonable period of time upon receipt of such a request at the email address below. It is not the intent of the Societyofcontrol to have violated or infringed upon any copyrights.”

Important in this respect is that he put the responsibility of reading/using/downloading the texts on his site with the viewers, and not with himself: “Anyone reading or looking at copyright material from this site does so at his/her own peril, we disclaim any participation or liability in such actions.”

Fark Yaraları = Scars of Différance and Multitude of blogs are maintained by the same author, Renc-u-ana, a philosophy and sociology student from Istanbul. The first is his personal blog (with also many links to downloadable texts), focusing on ‘creating an e-library for a Heideggerian philosophy and Bourdieuan sociology’ on which he writes ‘market-created inequalities must be overthrown in order to close knowledge gap.’ The second site has a clear aggregating function with the aim ‘to give united feedback for e-book publishing sites so that tracing and finding may become easier.’ And a call for similar blogs or websites offering free ebook content. The blog is accompanied by a nice picture of a woman warning to keep quiet, very paradoxically appropriate to the context. Here again, a statement from the host on possible copyright infringement: ‘None of the PDFs are my own productions. I’ve collected them from web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, socialist bros, cross-x, gigapedia..) What I did was thematizing.’ The same goes for pdflibrary (which seems to be from the same author), offering texts from Derrida, Benjamin, Deleuze and the likes: ‘None of the PDFs you find here are productions of this blog. They are collected from different places in the web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, all socialist bros, cross-x, …). The only work done here is thematizing and tagging.’

Our student from Istanbul lists many text sharing sites on Multitude of blogs, including Inishark (amongst others Badiou, Zizek and Derrida), Revelation (a lot of history and bible study), Museum of accidents (many resources relating to again, critical theory, political theory and continental philhosophy) and Makeworlds (initiated from the make world festival 2001). Mariborchan is mainly a Zizek resource site (also Badiou and Lacan) and offers next to ebooks also video and audio (lectures and documentaries) and text files, all via links to file sharing platforms.

What is clear is that the text sharing network described above (I am sure there are many more related to other fields and subjects) is also formed and maintained by the fact that the blogs and resource sites link to each other in their blog rolls, which is what in the end makes up the network of text sharing, only enhanced by RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, holding together direct communication streams with the rest of the community. That there has not been one major platform or aggregation site linking them together and uploading all the texts is logical if we take into account the text sharing history described before and this can thus be seen as a clear tactic: it is fear, fear for what happened to textz.com and fear for the issue of scale and fear of no longer operating at the borders, on the outside or at the fringes. Because a larger scale means they might really get noticed. The idea of secrecy and exclusivity which makes for the idea of the underground is very practically combined with the idea that in this way the texts are available in a multitude of places and can thus not be withdrawn or disappear so easily.

This is the paradox of the underground: staying small means not being noticed (widely), but will mean being able to exist for probably an extended period of time. Becoming (too) big will mean reaching more people and spreading the texts further into society, however it will also probably mean being noticed as a treat, as a ‘network of text-piracy’. The true strategy is to retain this balance of openly dispersed subversivity.

Update 25 November 2005: Another interesting resource site came to my attention recently: Bedeutung, a philosophical and artistic initiative consisting of three projects: Bedeutung Magazine, Bedeutung Collective and Bedeutung Blog, hosts a library section which links to freely downloadable online e-books, articles, audio recordings and videos.

RiP, Maecenas and Event

Brett Gaylor photo by Steve Garfield CC BY-NC-SA http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevegarfield/3361531377/

Brett Gaylor, the director of the Open Source documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto, is experimenting with the ‘Maecenas model’ (by others dubbed the ‘pay–as-you-like’ or Radiohead/NIN model) while launching his documentary online as a free download. I have written about RiP before here and since then the (CC licensed) feature length film has only gained more popularity and media attention.

WIRED dedicated a whole article, consisting of an interview with Gaylor, on the movie and discusses its business model, the release and popularity of the movie and the ‘copyfight movement’ Gaylor is involved in.

 Why would Gaylor choose the Maecenas model? When we consider other possible free online content (or Open Access) business models, the Maecenas model does seem to be a more logical model than the model I wrote about yesterday which Bloomsbury Academic is applying to Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix. For in this model there is a clear cut end product, a printed book that can be bought to cover the costs for the production and the free online dissemination of the product. In the case of RiP, this seems a less logical path to follow: the whole idea behind this documentary movie is of course that there is no end product: in the process of continually remixing, reediting and mashing-up the material RiP consists of, the documentary could better be seen as a (continuous) project than a product. As WIRED states: ‘in the realities of remix culture, where there is no such thing as a final cut’. This of course does not mean that certain ‘snapshots’ of the documentary can not be ’materialized’ and sold as products to cover for the costs. And Gaylor does this too, releasing DVD versions of the movie and showing his documentary in a theatrical run at movie theaters and festivals. So in a way, he is betting on two horses. However, Gaylor’s alternative choice for the Maecenas model seems very interesting for the current project. In this specific case it seems like a very good idea to apply this community based model, where RiP collected quite a large network of remix collaborators and enthusiasts around its project core and attracted lot of similar minded folks interested in the goals and values Gaylor tries to spread and promote with his movie, who might definitely be interested in promoting this project further.

However, one of the additional problems of financing and even possibly profiting from such an inherent collaborative and community based project is how to divide the costs and the benefits? As Gaylor states in the WIRED interview:

 “But since we have so many partners that helped us make the film, including theatrical and television distributors, it was a delicate balancing act to make sure the good faith they showed in making the film would be rewarded, that we wouldn’t undercut their efforts to promote and recoup on the film by giving it away.”

 This of course also refers to the problem of attribution in such an ‘authorless documentary’ or collaborative approach: who will get the money? Will it go to Gaylor, (who of course in this case is still very much the master mind and creative brain behind the project) will it go to the foundation Open Source Cinema, which Gaylor has founded?

For Gaylor this does not seem to be the biggest problem however. His goal is to make the documentary as largely available as possible, arguing that that should be what copyright should be about in the first place. Gaylor in WIRED:

 “We’ve gone to really great lengths to make this film as accessible as possible,” […]“It’s already on the Pirate Bay, and that’s great — it’s another delivery format. We didn’t put it there ourselves, though; we didn’t need to. Had we gone that route, it’s fairly likely, given the realities of the film-distribution universe, that we wouldn’t have these other opportunities to get the film to people who still watch TV, rent DVDs or go to movies, which is, in fact, most people. We wanted those people to watch this movie.”

 

When asked about his views on copyright he favors a balance between creating an incentive for producers and at the same time creating as wide accessibility to the consumer population as possible:

 “The classic copyright ones: Providing an incentive, while at the same time ensuring the public’s access to the work. Ultimately, that’s what I, and most people in this movement, are pushing for — a balance. So the film release was a lot more “free as in speech” than it was “free as in beer,” because it was important for me that average folks could see the film on TV or in theaters. And eventually, after a limited term (measured in months!), the film will fall into the public/pirate domain and be copied freely.”

 Gaylor also has some interesting thoughts about the future of remix culture and business models concerning movie distribution in such a context. He talks about going to the cinema as maybe becoming a (money making) experience event on the same scale as going to a concert. This could then serve as a way to cover for the costs that will be lost when the content will be available as a free download or as a pirated version:

 “We’ll see how I feel about that in a year. The remixing is just starting to take off, and I envision a time when these sorts of interactions will create an environment where a theatrical screening is to filmmakers what live performances are to musicians. The ability to create something unique for a particular screening or event allows you to offer an added value to that audience member, as well as have something unique that’s different from what you can get on a DVD or online.”

 And this is interesting indeed, while things might be increasingly online for free the logical option seems to be to charge for events that are unique and cannot be recreated in a ‘reproductive’ manner in an online environment. And this means that, paradoxically enough (or is it even that paradoxical?), Event becomes a capitalist commodity, whereas that what can be reproduced and spread easily online will more and more become available for free. Talk about turning around your business model.

Freedom on trial?

To continue the freedom of knowledge and information debate on a more practical level,

as most of you might have heard, bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay (which I have written about before here) is currently on trial. Interesting enough the people behind The Pirate Bay and similar Swedish organizations, like Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge, use the freedom of information argument to defend piracy. As he states:

 

“On the one side, there is the public. Every human with access to the Internet has received fingertip round-the-clock access to all of humanity’s collective knowledge and culture. This is a fantastic leap ahead for mankind – much larger than when public libraries arrived 160 years ago, and comparable to how society changed with the arrival of the printing press.
On the other side, there are the current people in power, who would like to harness this power to build a surveillance machine – collecting information about regular Joes, and actively preventing the free exchange of ideas – that would make George Orwell look like a cheery, skipping optimist. Many powerful institutions are pulling in this direction.”

 

The trial is already been called the ‘political trial of the century’ and seems to be going favorably for the Pirate Bay. Via BoingBoing I discovered that in honor of the trial of the Pirate Bay’s founders, the people behind the documentary series ‘Steal this film’ have released a new trial edition of what is eventually to become a movie on intellectual property right and file sharing. You can download it from their website. The first part of this documentary can be found in many places, including here.

This is actually a very interesting documentary (series), which follows the same idea as the remix documentary RiP I wrote about before, putting raw (searchable) footage and snippets of what is to become the final documentary online, together with more or less finalized versions of the documentary (like a sort of preprint in scholarly communication lingo).

 

 

 

The documentary follows roughly the same logic as Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix, arguing that it is of no use to criminalize a whole generation of downloaders or ‘pirates’ for that matter, and that it is much more productive to search for an alternative solution to this problem, or in other words to search for an alternative business model that will sustain the free flow of cultural goods and information. The documentary includes a very nice book history analogy, referring not only to the coming of the printing press but also to historical notions of book piracy, with contributions from famous book historians like Elisabeth Eisenstein and Robert Darnton. The documentary includes interviews with other renowned figures like Yochai Benkler, and Rick Prelinger from the Prelinger Archive. I like the way he makes the following statement near the end of the documentary:

 

“I think we need to have a broad conversation that is probably going to be an international conversation where people who make things and people who use things, I am talking about cultural works, sit together and think about what kinds of rules best serve these interests. I don’t know that we are going to agree, but I think we need to ask a little bit more about utopia, we need to really figure out what kind of a world we would like to live in and then try to craft regulations to match that. Being reactive doesn’t cut it.”

 

 

 

I saw Rick Prelinger speak at a Creative Commons conference in de Balie in Amsterdam a year ago, together with speakers like Kenneth Goldsmith from Ubuweb and people from Fabchannel, discussing alternative business models. The panel I attended discussed amongst others:

 

 “…the public content zone beyond that of user-generated-content: the possibilities and problems related to making professionally produced cultural productions publicly available on the internet. What kind of revenue models exist for that? How is the public interest in accessibility squared with the need of professionals to make a living? What new and alternative distribution models emerge for professional cultural producers and cultural institutions?”

 

I think this is the important discussion, as Rick Prelinger also stated above, we need to find a solution for both producers and consumers of cultural and knowledge products and content. For as the documentary and Lessig’s books also show, the potential value of the free availability of all this information on the Internet is huge, stimulating new cultural creativity and knowledge production in. Next to that this development can even be very beneficial for society and the economy in general. In fact, as a recent Dutch report on file sharing showed, file sharing can even foster (the Dutch) economic growth in the long run.

Update April 30th 2009: Another report from researchers at the BI Norwegian School of Management shows that people who pirate the most from P2P sites are also the ones most likely to buy legit downloads. Of course there is some discussion about these findings, but the conclusions are interesting nevertheless. (via: Ars Technica)

Be sure for more posts on alternative business models in the future.

Frankfurt Book Fair (I): Free Ebooks, Copyright and Piracy

As I visited the Frankfurt Book Fair last week, Ebooks and Ebook services seemed to be omnipresent. From E-readers to E-publishing experiments and from POD and software services to E-braries, the publishing value chain finally seems to have lost its fear when it comes to the embracing of the Ebook. This has lead to the rise of new digital service and platform providers, which I will reflect upon in a later post.

 

The opening speeches of the book fair can now be found online here. Two of them, one by Prof. Dr. Gottfried Honnefelder, the Director of the German Publishers & Booksellers Association and one by the famous Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, specifically talked about Ebooks. Interestingly enough, both of them see it as inevitable that in the future digital book content will be available for free. As Professor Honnefelder states:

 

“The existing business model doesn’t apply any longer. The publishers, who have worked with digital content for some time now, know this of course. The others have to learn how to handle it and accept that “Open Access” prevails time and again, and that Internet users don’t have any patience when the “free flow of information” runs into walls. A development towards this new openness is the future job of publishers and bookstores. In doing so, one must be ready to adopt new financial and publishing models and not always insist on copy being paid for. We are talking about new book-minded financial models which reward the publishers’ work in new, perhaps indirect ways. “

 

Paulo Coelho envisions a similar future:

 

“There’s an important element to this which most people are not fully aware of: people are sharing what they deem pertinent in a free way and they expect the same thing to occur in all systems of mass communication. (…) Yet, given that books as media are still widely used, why not share the whole digital content of books for free? Contrary to what common sense tells us – and common sense is not always a good guide, otherwise publishers, booksellers and writers would probably be doing something more profitable – the more you give, the more you gain.”

 

However, although Honnefelder thinks free will eventually prevail, he does seem to be afraid of the exploitment of online digital content, fearing piracy and copyright infringements:

 

“Education, knowledge, content – these are the resources of a modern society. But how do we keep it this way? These resources must be protected! Anyone who steals a book out of a bookstore can expect consequences. Why should there be different laws on the Internet? Simply because this book is not printed on paper and bound?” 

 

On the other hand, Paulo Coelho (or his alter ego “The Pirate Coelho”), sees more creative (and economic) possibilities in the sharing of content and information on the net:

 

“Yet, there are still two problems to tackle: copyrights and the sustainability of the publishing industry. I don’t have a solution, but we are facing a new era, so either we adapt or we die. However, I did not come here to share solutions, but my own experience as an author. Of course, I make a living out of my copyrights, but at this very moment I am not concentrating on this. I have to adapt myself. Not only by connecting more directly with my readers – something unthinkable a few years ago – but also by developing a new language, Internet-based, that will be the language of the future: direct, simple, without being superficial. Time will tell me how to recover the money I myself am investing alone in my social communities. But I am investing in something for which every single writer in the world would be grateful: to have his texts read by a maximum of people (…) The Internet has taught me this: don’t be afraid of sharing your ideas. Don’t be afraid of engaging others to voice their ideas. And more importantly, don’t presume who is and who is not a creator – because we all are.

   

This discussion clearly reflects how important it is to think about new ways to create revenue from free and in this respect the book business has a chance to create a progressive system, learning from the experience of the other digitized media (music, film). Before giving pirates the overhand, we should try to create a system that creates value of and that benefits from free, at least we should strive to do so. At least to me this seems better than fighting a movement that claims to follow the main mechanism of the Internet, based on the free sharing of information, and in this respect has already won beforehand.

Content is Context, Content is Conversation

Symposium Nederland Kennisland (02-10-08)

http://klstudio.wik.is/

 

Kennisland (Knowledgeland http://www.kennisland.nl/) is an independent Dutch think thank with the overall goal to make Holland smarter. They try to achieve this goal by means of research, advice, projects and networks focused on four main themes: creative economy, open innovation, smart government and smart schools.

 

I attended their yearly meeting KL Studio 2008 last Thursday at which a short presentation on OAPEN as a part of their Open Content workshop was given.

 

The Keynote speaker of this workshop was Rasmus Fleischer from Piratbyrån (http://piratbyran.org/) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piratbyr%C3%A5n) who gave a lecture on copyright. One of his main points was that we need to think beyond copyright. 21^st century copyright is less concerned with the individual work and is increasingly focusing on the tools that infringe copyright (software and indexing tools: for instance bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay). Fleischer however notes that piracy is much larger that just online P2P networks, there is also a lot of informal piracy (darknets, sneakernets).

 

An important conclusion from his speech is that the value does not lie in when everything is online and open. The value lies in what we do with all this information. In this respect value will increasingly lie in things that are specific, things that are unique (one place, one time, like for instance live music). Stuff that cannot be copied becomes more relevant (you can for instance compare this with lectures/conferences/networking in science). The question is how to create meaning out of cultural superabundance. In this respect software and indexing tools and also community forming will become more important: this can take care of the selecting, indexing, interconnecting, contextualizing and actualizing of content. In other words, we need to find new ways to put the content into context.

 

This connects to one of the other focus points of the symposium: how can we learn from other (open) business models in new media? For it is not only about a new business model but also about a mentality change/shift. And this is where the connection between the different initiatives lies. For open content has both a social and an economical impact. Content needs to be placed within a context, we need to communicate. Quoting Cory Doctorow: “Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”

  

 

Other interesting links:

http://www.ilovebusinessmodellen.nl/