New Visions For The Book – Part I

A few weeks ago the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University brought together a group of digital humanists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds as part of the unique summer institute One Week | One Tool. The aim of One Week | One Tool was to come up with an (open source) digital tool to aid humanities scholarship. The catch was that this whole process of tool-building could take no longer than a week. The tool the group came up with and, as part of the deal, actually build, is called Anthologize. Anthologize, as the tagline proclaims, ‘use(s) the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book.’ The idea is that you can grab content from your own blog or other blogs, order it, determine the layout and publish it, both in print and in different electronic formats.

Next to being a refreshing project and a useful tool, what I found interesting about Anthologize is the (implicit) notion that lies behind it’s conception, namely the idea of what a scholarly book should or can be.

Anthologize it

Let’s take a closer look at a blogpost about Anthologize written by Dan Cohen, the director of the Center for History and New Media. Cohen is a historian who, in his own words, ‘explores—and tries to influence through theory, software, websites, and his blog—the impact of computing on the humanities.’ In the post he wrote to introduce Anthologize, there are a few interesting preconceptions concerning the book. For instance, he begins his post with stating the following:

“A long-running theme of this blog has been the perceived gulf between new forms of online scholarship—including the genre of the blog itself—and traditional forms such as the book and journal.”

This sentence is very interesting for various reasons. First of all Cohen talks about the perceived (and thus not real) gulf between online scholarship, such as the blog, and traditional forms such as the book. Furthermore he states that the book and the blog are both forms of scholarship, they are just different genres. Finally, he refers to how discussions surrounding the scholarly book mostly have been conducted by opposing new online forms of scholarship to traditional print scholarship such as the book and the journal.

Further on Cohen explains more in detail what Anthologize has to offer:

“Today marks the launch of this effort: Anthologize, software that converts the popular open-source WordPress system into a full-fledged book-production platform. Using Anthologize, you can take online content such as blogs, feeds, and images (and soon multimedia), and organize it, edit it, and export it into a variety of modern formats that will work on multiple devices.”

In this sentence it becomes clear that both Cohen and the One Tool | One Week people argue for a concept of the book that goes beyond the print format, where in their view books can be delivered in various formats (including, but not exclusively, print) suitable to be read on (and by) various devices. Furthermore, they—I would say consciously—push for a broad(er) idea of what a book can consist off: in their vision a (scholarly) book can, besides text, consist of all kinds of multimedia content. Furthermore, it can consist of material that has been previously online available—hence published—such as blogposts. Thus with Anthologize a book becomes a selection of online available material which can be expanded with new texts and/or multimedia content. Finally, it offers the creator of the book the possibility to instantly publish the book her or himself, without the help of publishers or self-publishing platforms.

As I will state, with this tool Cohen and the people from One Week | One Tool argue for a concept of the book that goes beyond the idea of the traditional printed scholarly book. Anthologize forms a, perhaps implicit, critique against connotations that are an intrinsic part of the production process of a scholarly book as it is currently common in print publishing: double-blind peer review and quality control and branding by a reputable press. In this way they try to challenge or by-pass the traditional authorities that determine whether a scholarly book is fit to be published.

The New Age of the Supplement

About a decade ago there was another historian that thought about new futures for the book: Robert Darnton. Darnton is a leading expert on eighteenth-century France, a book historian who writes about electronic publishing, and the founder of Gutenberg-e, the electronic monograph series. Currently Darnton is a professor in the History department at Harvard University and the director of the Harvard University Library. In 1999 Darnton wrote the article “The New Age of the Book” published in the New York Review of Books, in which he criticizes the publishing system surrounding the scholarly monograph and opts for a different system based on the electronic publishing of books. In this article Darnton puts forward a concept of the book that again differs from that of Cohen et. al.

In the first paragraph of his article Darnton paraphrases Marshall McLuhan:

“Marshall McLuhan’s future has not happened. The Web, yes; global immersion in television, certainly; media and messages everywhere, of course. But the electronic age did not drive the printed word into extinction, as McLuhan prophesied in 1962. His vision of a new mental universe held together by post-printing technology now looks dated. If it fired imaginations thirty years ago, it does not provide a map for the millennium that we are about to enter. The “Gutenberg galaxy” still exists, and “typographic man” is still reading his way around it.”

Darnton puts the printed book here in direct opposition to the web, and can in this sense be seen as part of the discourse which emphasises the gulf between the online and the book mentioned by Cohen. Darnton casually argues that the world as we know and perceive it is still build on the concept of the printed book. For Darnton a book is foremost distinguishable by its codex format. In his vision the codex is a great technology; it is a format which is great for packaging information, it is superb for storage, and thus for archiving, and remarkably resistant to damage and is therefore good to preserve. Furthermore, it misses some of the tiresome drawbacks one can attribute to electronic publications (such as charging batteries). Most importantly, Darnton states the codex is valuable in that it has been the basic tool for learning for thousands of years.

However, Darnton’s vision for the book is more versatile, as we soon will see. But by equalling the book with the codex here and highlighting the codex’s continued benefits, he seems to be catering to a certain rhetoric in this part of his article, where he refers to the continued fear that electronic publishing will cause people to do away with the traditional book:

“If the future brings newspapers without news, journals without pages, and libraries without walls, what will become of the traditional book? Will electronic publishing wipe it out?”

By proposing a new future for the book, Darnton paints a picture of two visions of the book (one print and one electronic) that can exist side-by-side. Furthermore the electronic book is in his view something different, a supplement to the traditional book, not a replacement of it.

In this carefully crafted article Darnton goes on to show how this alternative concept, of the electronic book as a supplement, could even be beneficial for the scholarly book. Darnton’s push towards electronic publishing seems to be triggered essentially by two related problems in the field surrounding monograph publishing: the crisis in scholarly publishing, making it increasingly hard to get a monograph published, and the related problem of attaining tenure for young scholars, were tenure is directly coupled to the publishing of a monograph by a reputable press. In this way we could interpret this article—and the concept of the book put forward here by Darnton—foremost as a rhetorical device aimed at solving these problems.

The possibilities of electronic publishing however lead further than just saving the current print publishing model and the reputation system that is build upon it from extinction. And this is where Darnton carefully sets out his famous vision of the book as a pyramid build up of different layers of diverse data which can expand on and supplement the printed book in an online environment. The function of this electronic book is not so much to be read however, but to serve as an archive, a database, a search engine and a social text were people can interact with the text and with each other. In the final paragraph of his article Darnton sums up his strategy concerning the use of his book concept perfectly:

“Far from being utopian, the electronic monograph could meet the needs of the scholarly community at the points where its problems converge. It could provide a tool for prying problems apart and opening up a new space for the extension of learning.”

Although perhaps in practice Darnton’s vision of the book as pyramid model and Cohen’s et.al. Anthologize model seem to lie not that far apart, there are some clear differences between both visions. In Darnton’s view for instance, putting something on the web does not make something into a book. Here he gives the example of a dissertation:

“Certainly, we can dump unlimited numbers of dissertations onto the Web. Several programs exist for providing this service—and it is a genuine service: it makes research available to readers. But as a rule, this kind of publication provides mainly information, not fully developed scholarship, at least not in most of the humanities and social sciences. Anyone who has read raw dissertations knows what I mean: with few exceptions, they are not books. A world of difference separates them. To become a book, a dissertation must usually be reorganized, trimmed here and expanded there, adapted to the needs of a lay reader, and rewritten from top to bottom, preferably with the help of an experienced editor.”

As Darnton states above, professional editing stays a necessity, electronic publishing is still something that needs to be done by a publisher, who provides a certain amount of authority and adds value to the publication and thus turns it into a full-fledged scholarly book.

Books as Power Tools

In both Darnton’s and Cohen’s articles the concept of the book is part of a larger strategy. Darnton wants to take away the fear concerning electronic publishing by focussing on the remarkable assets and staying power of the printed book. Cohen wants to create a tool that makes it easier for people to publish their own digital book without necessarily loosing the quality offered by professional publishers. Darnton wants to experiment with the new features online publications offer but without loosing the quality control and authority invested upon these online works by professional publishers. Cohen introduces a tool that can serve as an alternative to professional publishing. Darnton wants to heal the scholarly communication system made up of publishers and tenure committees by introducing electronic publishing. Cohen wants to subvert this same system by proposing a system that forms an alternative to the vested authority and quality provisions offered by publishers. But at the same time he doesn’t really touch upon other vested notions surrounding the book such as authorship and the stability of the text, and neither does Darnton, nor do they actively challenge the format of the book as the one being most suitable for (humanities) scholarship. Darnton’s and Cohen’s strategic concepts are also very time-bound. Darnton made a plea for electronic publishing and electronic books when the publishing industry only just began adapting to the online environment. Cohen’s et. al. Anthologize is developed in a time were electronic publishing is a must and Anthologize is one of the many tools that are being developed to encourage online humanities scholarship. Both their concepts of the book are very much part of these specific struggles. And it is not unlikely that Darnton’s vision concerning the book in the last ten years has become more like that of Cohen.

What I wanted to show by conflating these two viewpoints is that there is no such thing as a ‘book’ or an essential definition of the book. The book is a contested concept. As history has shown us a book can be a scroll as well as a codex, a paperback, a PDF or a collection of blogposts. The book is what we make of it. A book consists of possibilities; a book is becoming. As I have tried to show above, definitions and essentialist notions concerning what a book is (or should be, or was) can be seen as rhetorical devices used to argue for a specific knowledge and communication system. Visions concerning the book are being used as a means to control, shape, structure and think these systems. Consciously or unconsciously, the way we define the book, the way we work with and create the book, says a lot about the knowledge system we prefer or would like to have.

However, although I claim that there is no essential definition of the book, this doesn’t mean that in the discourse surrounding the book essentialist notions don’t play a major role. All the same, they should be seen as part of the struggle for, to put it bluntly, a remainder of the status quo, a return to the past or a turn towards another possible future of scholarly communication. Definitions of the book are power tools, books can be seen as discursive weapons to defend a virtual future both for the book and for knowledge. This becomes clear amongst others by the way definitions or essentialist notions surrounding the book often take the form of dialectical oppositions. One of the most common examples is when the book gets contrasted with the ebook. The ebook is opposed to the book as something different, were it connotes a knowledge system based on or turning toward the Internet and digital media. The need for such a distinction is quite strange if we think about it. There is no such thing as an e-song for instance, or an e-album. If we take it closer to home, there is also no such thing as an e-article (although there is an e-journal). The use of the word ebook is part of a struggle, it is a strategical tool used both by proponents and critics of ebooks to connote that here something different is happening. We can broaden this allegory to other fields were the struggle for a new system is felt the most. Think about the digital humanities and electronic literature (again: no digital biology). These dialectical stances are used to defend another notion of the humanities and another notion of literature. Interestingly enough one could argue that once these ‘other’ positions become more mainstream and accepted the additive e- mostly seems to disappear.

Essential Bookfuturism

Another use of this dialectical essentialism can be found in the term bookfuturism. Bookfuturism is a term invented by Joanne McNeill—an American science and technology writer—for a Twitter list following book aficionados. The term also shows similarities with the blog Bookfutures, written by Chris Meade, director of if:book London, a think thank for the future of the book. The term Bookfuturism was picked up and given theoretical grounding by Tim Carmody, self-proclaimed bookfuturist, Wired Gadget Lab editor and writer for various blogs on book technology and media. Carmody started a group blog called Bookfuturism and wrote “A Bookfuturist Manifesto” for The Atlantic. As Carmody explains, Bookfuturism plays with two dialectial oppositions: bookservatism and technofuturism. Carmody describes them as follows:

“Now, even bookservatives acknowledge that things are changing. But they fear that these changes will result in catastrophe, for some part or whole of the culture they love. Because of that, they would prefer that book tech and book culture stop, slow down, or go back. (…) On the other side of the aisle are technofuturists. They’re winning most of the arguments these days when it comes to e-books, so their rhetoric isn’t as wild. Technofuturists are technological triumphalists, or at least quasi-utopian optimists. These are the folks who believe that technology can solve our political, educational, and cultural problems. At an extreme, they don’t care about books at all: they’re just relics of a happily closing age of paper, and we should embrace the future in the form of multimedia and the networked web.”

As Carmody rightfully proclaims however, there is no such thing as a bookservatist or a technofuturist, these are simply stances people can uptake to argue for something:

“Almost nobody is a pure bookservative or technofuturist. Rather, these are rhetorical positions that anyone can take up, from moment to moment and case to case. Moreover, each is dependent on the other, because each imagines their opponent as the other. They are easy caricatures. But sometimes we ARE caricatures.”

Bookfuturists, in Carmody’s vision, refuse both positions. He sees it as a way of thinking about the book that is critical to both positions. Again here the book becomes a rhetorical device, a metaphor to think about new technology and its impact on knowledge:

“We’re usually more interested in figuring out a piece of technology than either denouncing or promoting it. And we want to make every piece of tech work better. We’re tinkerers. We look to history for analogies and counter-analogies, but we know that analogies aren’t destiny. We try to look for the technological sophistication of traditional humanism and the humanist possibilities of new tech.”

Although, as I have argued above, there is no essential definition of the book—only positions—that does not mean it is not interesting to analyse the different positions people take up and the different characteristics or essential notions they assign to the book to argue for a certain knowledge system. For although the book has been a contested concept for ages (as the history of the book has shown), the specific (dialectical) positions we take in when it comes to the book at this moment, say a lot about the particular issues we are struggling with at the dawning of the digital age. How do we create a knowledge system that might in the future no longer be build upon the book (exclusively) anymore and which will perhaps mean a definitive shift away from the previously cited Gutenberg Galaxy and Typographic man?

To explore what these essential notions are that get attributed to the book by specific groups these days—for instance the stability of the printed book vs. the limitless networked book—is crucial, as it says a lot about not only the book but about our age as well. The struggle for the book is a struggle to keep up with technological change and a reaction against these upheavals. However, the discourse surrounding the book at the same time structures the way we use and adopt new technology. Media transform but they are also invented at the same time.

Furthermore, as I will argue next, it might prove essential to deconstruct these notions that we have attributed to the book to see what we actually value about them and how we can either adopt them or transform them concerning our needs and the possibility offered by digital technology. Some of the deepest essential notions that seem to stick with the book (and have been part of the discourse on the book since its conception), even in the digital age, have to do with authorship, stability and, especially in scholarly communication: authority. Fresh insights and experimental practices might be a necessity to bring these notions up to the next level and to expose and confront them to new possibilities and alternative futures. Futures in which the book is never just a book.

Do not ask me to remain the same

Nicola Dale - Browser (2008)

Definitions are intrinsically time-bound. Imagine the fundamental question of ‘What is a book’. To ask this question at this moment in time means we have to take into account the present transformation or remediation of the book. Definitions concerning the nature of the book need to bare in mind its past as well as its potential future. Any definition is for this reason a highly contextual one. The concept of the book has always been flexible as books are constantly evolving, as is our perception of them. Books have survived various medial changes and they (or we) have always found a way to adapt to their new carriers: from scroll to codex and from paperback to e-book. Rather than to pin-down a static definition of the book, we are better of seeing (the concept of) the book as an unfolding process.

I would like to take a look at a few theorists who, since the coming of the Internet and digital media, have tried to problematize and re-think the definition(s) of the book that were in use before the digital era. To determine whether there exists a common denominator to define the book, and if so, what it is, these theorists have focused on a few aspects of the book. By looking at its specific materiality, and at the way the book’s carrier differs from and influences its content (text), and by comparing the book with other media, they collectively guide the conversation of what a book is and should be, further into the future.

On if:book, the group blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book, some interesting posts on the concept of the book have appeared over the last few years, written by the institute’s staff. Dan Visel, in a post entitled What we talk about when we talk about books (2006), explains how there actually are two main discourses surrounding the book: one that focuses on the physical form of the book (the book as a specific reading-device) and one that focuses on the content of the book. He explains how these discourses have eventually led to some confusion in the digital world were an e-book for many people could mean both the content itself, as well as its carrier (more commonly known as an e-reader). In his post Visel examines how the so-called limited character of the printed book is being challenged by the potentially evolving content of the online edition. He wonders where we draw the boundaries with so-called networked books. Are the texts it connects to via hyperlinking part of the book? Are the readers’ comments part of the book?

Kevin Kelly, Internet dinosaur and one of the founders of Internet-magazine Wired, states in his essay Scan this book! (2006) that a book can hold essentially everything. In his ideal future of the book, the book becomes a kind of synecdoche of the ‘universal library’. As Kelly states, the universal library will consist of ‘the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.’ In this world of networked books, no book will be an island (as they are in the print world). Each book will be integrated and connected by means of links and tags. Books transform into one universal book. As Kelly writes: ‘in a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book.’

Interestingly enough, in Kelly’s view this universal book will incorporate all media, textual media as well as for instance sound and visual media. The writers on the if:book blog wonder however if we, when we use such a broad concept of the book, will not turn it into a meaningless term. Will the book in the end still be a useful concept to use in the online world?

As Roger Sperberg states, in an if:book post entitled What is a book? (2006), a book is foremost something you read, distinguishing it from media that we watch or listen to. He feels that some way or another ‘text’ should remain on the foreground, where text involves a certain amount of what he calls ‘commitment’ from the reader:

‘But if “book” no longer means the intellect is permitted to come to the foreground in this way, if text and how it requires this is diminished to insignificance, then we will have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and what we have then will perhaps be entertaining and educational and absorbing, but it will not be a book, whatever label attaches to it.’

Brian Dettmer - Book Autopsies

Sperberg wonders at what point, with all theses multimedia additions in the online world, we still recognize a ‘book’ as a book. What is the essence of a book? Sperberg feels we should be able to distinguish some salient features or expectations of the book. Visel agrees where he states in his previously mentioned post that we should be looking at similarities and relationships between the objects we commonly denote as books. But both Visel as well as Sperberg admit that this remains a non bullet-proof approach. Sperberg finally throws it on intuition (‘we will know a book as we see it’) and Visel concludes there will probably be multiple futures of the book.

Where in Kelly’s utopian future the (printed) book will in the end give way to the screen as the dominant medium or device for reading, the viewpoints of Robert Darnton—the renowned book historian—are  more inline with Visel’s, where Darnton foresees a hybrid future for the book. In his seminal article The New Age of the Book (1999) he gives a more practice-based outlook on the book, based on the way books are actually being used at the moment. From these usages he distills a future scenario in which printed books and e-books will continue to exist side-by-side. E-books will become an extension of printed books, an add-on. The book as a reading device is just way too good a format to store and communicate information, Darnton explains. It is a very usable format. Furthermore, reading from screens remains an inferior experience, not to say a real hassle for many people. As Darnton concludes, ‘in short, the old-fashioned codex, printed on folded and gathered sheets of paper, is not about to disappear into cyberspace’.

Darnton’s concept of the book is a hybrid one, one that expands from paper into the digital realm. The digital is a supplement or (in some cases) the paper edition is an abstract. The electronic part is particularly useful for certain publics (especially scholars) and certain purposes (scanning, referencing, searching for information). But Darnton does not believe people will in the end read whole books online. Furthermore, he introduces the importance of the cultural practices and institutional and political economy surrounding the book in academia. In a culture in which the printed book plays such an important role in reputation structures, he wonders whether electronic monographs will essentially be acknowledged as books in these communities.

Nicola Dale - The world as I see it (2007)

The approach to the book of literary critic Katherine Hayles—a specialist in the field of electronic literature—is again a different one. Her focus lies not on the way readers’ usage of books determines its future shape, but on the way the specific materiality of a text influences its meaning, and with that our interpretation of the text. As Hayles claims in her article Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality (2003), one of the main problems with trying to define the book as it is being ‘translated’ into a digital format (which she sees as a re-interpretation of the book) is that, as she states, ‘our notions of textuality are shot through with assumptions specific to print, although they have not been generally recognized as such.’

In Hayles’ vision of the book as it is transforming she agrees with Visel and Sperberg, where in analyzing this process we should think of correspondences (and as Hayles also adds, of dissimilarities!) instead of ontologies. For Hayles it seems however more interesting to look at the processes of the translation of texts from print to the online than looking at the book and e-book as specific objects. We should try to find out what the differences in materiality are between print and electronic textuality and how this specific materiality influences the way we perceive a text. In Hayles’ vision the format of the book and its content are intrinsically connected, and in this way she pulls together and incorporates the two separate discourses surrounding the book mentioned earlier by Visel. Text is not dematerialized and is dependant on its carrier.

 

Hayles argues that when we claim the digital is immaterial, we bring along our print-centered notions. Thes kind of notions can be found in both the work of Kelly, as well as in the work of someone who in many ways can be seen as Kelly’s opponent, Sven Birkerts. Birkerts is a literary critic and author of The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), a work very critical of electronic media and online reading. Both in Birkerts’ as well as in Kelly’s view digital text can be seen as missing a specific materiality. With Kelly this immateriality of text and its translation into binary code leads him to perceive all online media as one digital muddle, giving it the potential to mix and recombine with other dematerialized media into ‘a single liquid fabric’. In Birkerts’ opinion on the other hand this immateriality is a big loss. In The Gutenberg Elegies he states that ‘nearly weightless though it is, the word printed on a page is a thing. The configuration of impulses on a screen is not (…)’ For Birkerts it is very important that the materiality of print fixes the word, where the fleeing and weightless character of online text is detrimental to the autonomy of the word and eventually, as Birkerts concludes, it will be detrimental to the autonomy of the self.

But as Hayles tries to argue, we cannot perceive of a text as an ‘immaterial construction independent from its carrier.’ Books undergo a transformation when they enter the digital domain, an aspect too easily neglected by for instance Kelly. Text is not simply digital bits; in its digital counterpart it also has a specific form or materiality. As Hayles writes, electronic textuality ‘cannot be separated from the delivery vehicles that produce it as a process with which the user can interact.’ In her view of the specificity of digital texts, text becomes a distributed phenomenon. She sees a text as an embodied entity, which in the virtual world can be embodied in various reading devices.

Hayles seems to push the discussion on the book to a higher level where in her view we can not determine or distract what a book is from (looking at) its materiality. We can only look at the way the book’s physicality influences the way we perceive a text. We can only look at a book’s content and how this is influenced by its materiality, in which this materiality can, as Hayles sees it, extend beyond the individual object. A text’s materiality is an interaction between the specific format the text is molded in and the specific meaning or content of the text. As Hayles concludes, in this discourse ‘texts would routinely be discussed both in terms of their conceptual content and their physical embodiments.’

            From this short review of different attempts to describe the ever-changing phenomenon of the book, it seems there are various (perhaps even inexhaustible) ways to analyze this increasingly distributed phenomenon. We can look at the similarities and dissimilarities of the different shapes the book shifts into, and we can compare these with the appearances of other media; we can look at the way we ‘recognize’ a book, both in its more intuitive sense as well as the in the way we acknowledge something as a book within certain cultural discourses; we can look at the way a book is used, or we can look at its utopian or dystopian potential as a theoretical concept extracted from its format; and, we can focus on its specific materiality or on a combination of a particular device and its content. All approaches, from looking at the medium to looking at its usage and the discourses surrounding it, seem to add some flavor to the discussion. Perhaps we can only get closer to the transforming book by accepting and stimulating such a plurality of viewpoints. Just like the book itself, the discussion on the book will keep on expanding further into the digital future.

Highlights from APM – Day 2

The second day of the Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean region (APM) conference started with a session (entitled Strength in numbers) on cooperation between and the (future) role of university presses.

 

The first speaker was Roman Schmidt (Sens Public, editor-in-chief of crossXwords), who, in his very inspiring lecture entitled Request for comments: discussing the role of the University Press within the university, took on the role of an observer who is working on media change, but not necessarily within the university press.

Schmidt argues that we need to stress for formalized criteria when it comes to Internet standards concerning academia, being an inaugural act of science where deliberation is a pivotal point. This approach has two problems however. The first problem is concerned with the publish or perish paradigm, which is especially urgent amongst young scholars. Schmidt calls this a structural problem of the university system, where oral presentations, discussions, comments, blog entries etc. do not pay off career wise, where much time is actually invested in them. What does pay off is the writing of an article or a book. The question is however if these are still the preferred formats of communication for (young) scholars.

In this respect the university press could play a role in establishing a relationship with the university to facilitate these kind of more discursive, non ‘academic’ (non peer reviewed) academic discourses. Schmidt argues that we need an epistemological shift out of this intramural space to break the publish or perish spiral. We need a new ecology of scientific publications. This shift to editorial models needs to be accompanied in a good manner however, and in this aspect European university presses could play a big role in new ways of knowledge production and experimentation. They could form experimental labs for the future of academic publishing.

 

Schmidt mentions 3 aspects of a possible relationship between an university press and an university:

 

1. Quality management and specialization: university presses could focus on the formation of thematic research hubs, replacing the university in the Humboldian sense. Specialization could in this sense both lead to economies of scale and to quality labels, by means of cooperation and combination (Schmidt mentions the OAPEN project in this context). Another interesting initiative connected to this that Schmidt mentions is ADONIS in France, an overall portal of research in the HSS field.
2. Training of university staff. According to Schmidt training and mentoring is a much neglected area of media change. How should we train (scientific) content producers? The prosumer paradigm does not make this distinction obsolete he argues. For good stilistic and qualitative high scientific writing the university press is still needed. And this is a role that is especially well suited for university presses and less for publishers. This training is an investment in human resources, preparing them for a variety of editorial roles. Schmidt mentions for instance the website Hypothèses, which hand picks quality scientific blogs. He argues that these kind of initiatives are excellent platforms for learning to write smaller pieces as a natural evolution to learning to write a monograph.
3. International credibility and translation. University presses are not only facing a problem of scale but also of international visibility of their titles. This is closely connected to the problem of European multilingualism. Schmidt quotes Umberto Eco: translation is the language of Europe. Scale and cooperation could assist: university presses could get funding for translations as a consortium. Schmidt mentions the journal Eurozine as a good example of this policy. One could also adopt this model to monographs. As Schmidt says, these kind of initiatives correspond very well to the post national constellation, following Rimbaud’s adagio to create a new medium, il faut être absolument moderne.

 

Gonzalo Cappellàn from the University of Cantabria Press, talked about the situation of the Spanish university presses (consisting of  at the moment 60 public university and research centers), their strenghts and weaknesses and the need for quality assesment. The Spanish universities differ very much when it comes to size, specialisation and the way they rule their presses. Initiatives have arisen for Spanish publishers to join together, in 2007 UNE (Spanish university publishers association/ Unión de Editoriales Universitarias) and, more recently, the G9 group of universities.

These cooperations offer the presses greater presence on a national level as a collectivity, a strategic alliance which can present joint measures which are almost impossible to achieve for small publishers. The collaborations also function on an international level: international catalogues, media, newsletters, promotion lobbying on an higher level for their authors etc.

Another benefit has to do with the fact that, as Cappellàn states, Spanish university presses are very much focused on their own institution, which has lead to the feeling that their quality check is not that great. Editorial boards are becoming increasingly important however, as is formalized peer review.

 

The G9 group consists of public universities in autonomous communities. They develop joint electronic projects. Editorial cooperation takes place on two levels: first step is to create a distinctive label, which is growing further with joint publishing. This is also a quality label, it consists of an editiorial board with representatives of the 9 universities, so no editoiral board consisting of the staff of one university. A scientific board can be set up with expertise in a certain field, functioning as referees to evaluate the scientific quality. In this way the combined group of 9 can be a distinctive pressence in the Spanish publication landscape. On another level the group could focus on interesting publications that are not published by the 9 but that are interesting because of their quality. This is a totally new experience in Spanish publishing. The G9 will start up in April and experiment. It will be open spirited, inter-university and internationally focused, concludes Cappellàn.

 

Werner Mark Linz from the American University in Cairo Press (AUC) talked about the differences of academic publishing in the Arab world and the cooperation between mediteranean and Arab publishing. The main goal of AUC is the dissemination of ideas and knowledge about the arab world to the english reading public. They mainly publish books in the Humanities in 6-7 areas, mainly arabic literature in translation, but also on archaeology in ancient Egypt, Islamic art and architecture. Linz states that in the Arab market not much is being published and their exists not much of an infrastrucute (bookstores etc.). Linz recalls how AUC needed to develop a booktrade in order to function. In Egypt for instance the printer/publisher/bookseller is still one trade, there is not so much differentiation. The focus is also mainly on religious books (Koran and Koran related books). Next to that one can also see much translations: a lot of energy is spend in translating books into Arabic (instead of the other way around). Arab countries are financing these translations, which thus form a big market for publishers.

 

Saskia de Vries from Amsterdam University Press (AUP) gave a presentation on the OAPEN project, in which OAPEN functions as an EU presses cooperative publishing network. She sees the public function of the press as a mission, to experiment with new modes of book publication, as for example Open Access.

De Vries, quoting the American Association of University Presses (www.aaupnet.org), states the value of university presses as follows:

 

 

 

-         University Presses add value to scholarly work through rigorous editorial development; professional copyediting and design; and worldwide dissemination.

-         University Presses, through the peer review process, test the validity and soundness of scholarship and thus maintain high standards for academic publication.

-         University Presses sponsor work in specialized and emerging areas of scholarship that do not have the broad levels of readership needed to attract commercial publishers.

-         University Presses make available to the broader public the full range and value of research generated by university faculty.

 

University presses have always been a service provider for the academic world, mostly in the HSS. In this respect Open Access publications are a very important new way of disseminating research, argues De Vries. It gives academics new possibilities to publish their research. De Vries mentions the Ithaka report. University presses need to look to the dissemination side, they need to make a renewed commitment to publishing. De Vries also refers to Robert Darnton’s pyramid model as set out in his article The new age of the book (from The New York Review of Books). The OAPEN project is a direct result of these two developments. De Vries also mentions the possibility to create an European University Press Association and plans that are being made in this respect.

 

In the afternoon session on the outreach of scholarly publishing, Stephen Barr from SAGE talked about SAGE’s experiments in Open Access publishing and their collaboration with Hindawi.

When it comes to Open Access Barr states that SAGEs mission is to be ‘the natural home for authors, editors and societies’. The journals landscape is changing however and we have to change with it. As Barr states, in order to maintain the high quality service they provide, SAGE has constantly embraced new technology and business models. And in the journal environment part of this is now Open Access. Barr talks about the different Open Access models and options, mentioning Open Archiving (Green OA, Mandates, Peer project), the hybrid option (SAGE Open) of which the take up so far has been limited and restricted to biomedical disciplines, funder policies such as the Wellcome Trust’s and many more funding agencies which are now allowing a portion of grants to be used for OA financing, and finally, gold Open Acces publishing: author side charges in the form of article processing charges. In this area PLoS and BioMed Central are of course the big players.

SAGE wanted to find a way to experiment with gold OA publishing that would not detract from its other priorities and would complement its existing operations. It decided, says Barr, to get into OA publishing through strategic partnerships, in this case with the Hindawi  publishing agency.

Barr mentions some reasons why SAGE partnered with Hinawi: synergy in organisational philosophy, low risk experiment with new business model, minimum organisational risk, access to Hindawi’s technology and low cost base, complementary, the advantage to Hindawi is SAGE’s reputation, marketing abilities and editorial reach and experience. Barr’s conclusion is that SAGE is embracing new business models and that this is necessary in order to keep up with developments.

 

 

Ancient texts in new worlds

I am now the proud owner of number 167 of the hand-bound limited second edition of Anthony Grafton’s little booklet called Codex in crisis.

 

The colophon states amongst others:

 

Cover paper Neenah Classic Laid in Peppered Bronze

Text paper Mohawk Superfine in Bright White

Flyleaf paper Frazier Pegasus in Black

 

 

Codex in Crisis, an adaptation of Grafton’s article Future Reading. Digitization and its discontents, previously published in The New Yorker, is published by The Crumpled Press, who, as they state on their website, perish to publish. Their business model revolves around the production of ‘custom cut, bone folded, hand sewn pamphlets and books’ for the real bibliophile. And they are beautiful.

 

The contents itself are equally inspiring. Anthony Grafton, who is Professor of History at Princeton University, and is a specialist in the field of Renaissance and Reformation studies and Historiography, published amongst others, books on The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) and What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

 

Codex in Crisis concentrates on the history and development of the book as format, medium and conceptual idea. Grafton spook about his book during an interview held with him about a week ago as part of the Historisch Café (historical café) series organized amongst others by Athenaeum bookstore in Amsterdam. The talk was entitled ‘Would Erasmus use Google’, and focused on the book and its relationship to the accelerated world we live in today in which changes are going faster than we could ever have imagined before. Referring to his previously published article, Grafton talked about how he holds The New Yorker in high regard, jokingly calling it one of the last magazines where they actually read what they publish and where they work with a whole lot of smart and alert people.

 

Grafton’s main focus is on how the situation for books and reading texts has changed the last years. This shift has had some major implications where at the moment the newspaper is dying in the US and staff is being sacked en masse in US publishing industries. The world of publishing and bookselling is in uproar: only a few major players survived; Amazon, Barnes and Nobles and Borders, that’s it, and Borders is almost bankrupt. Simultaneously we are seeing the rise of eBook readers. As Grafton remarks, they are only getting better and better. But their development will be like the codex to the scroll. We won’t get rid of the old format just like that, but Grafton does foresee a development in which the main thing we are going to be reading in the near future is electronic text. This will bring major changes, not only in reading but also in our consciousness.

Referring to an UK eBook survey, Grafton remarks that scholars spend on average 8 minutes with an online article. The online medium is very well amenable to what is called power skimming: your eyes just scan the text and don’t really process. We get lots of information, but we have no clue.

In the US the bookstore has been driven out. Grafton’s surprise at seeing so much bookstores of all shapes and sizes in Amsterdam makes him to conclude that their must be more of a reading culture in Europe than in the US. The decline in reading culture has been going hand in hand with the rise of a gaming culture, where according to Grafton every male under 30 in the US plays games for at least 2 hours a day. This effects not only their way of reading but it is also a form of competition in time spend for leisure.

Grafton also sees the changes taking place within the library itself. In the library nobody reads books anymore, it is increasingly filled with fast computers. And a café.

The new kind of reading is an interactive way of reading. Students still read intensely says Grafton, but the level is lower than two generations ago. The GI bill generation, which transformed the universities and made them radically more democratic, saw the rise of Catholics and Jews in universities, who came to college because they now could. There are real changes to be seen, says Grafton, in current student and university culture. He claims that for instance Jakob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien is simply found to hard to follow for students nowadays. And that’s a worry. The students do write better according to Grafton, but they don’t read as well anymore.

 When asked what he is aiming at with his book, Grafton responds his goal was to state his worries but also his exhilaration about the new possibilities for the book. The idea of the universal library, which is never going to happen of course, was what Google and its comrades promised to create. But one of the first problems was that there were not an estimated 30, but 100 million books in the world. Another problem is that although you can find a lot of content via Google, you can not access it all. It is searchable, but that does not mean it is all available. In this way Google could be seen as a live catalogue. They are fast and at the same time incredibly secretive. This explains Robert Darnton’s stance in a recent article in The New York Review of Books. Darnton, whom Grafton calls an eloquent and brilliant guy, is currently head librarian of the Harvard libraries. But he is also a diplomat. Harvard library is digitized by Google, but what Google will not do is guarantee that it will never charge any money to have access to the books. That is why Harvard is breaking off their deal with Google: they want the guarantee of free content. This is another reason why we will never have an universal library since not all the libraries are or will be working together with Google. And what about the books that Google is not interested in: Third World country books for instance. Those cultures are neglected. If it will be anything, it will be a universal Western (plus Russian) library.

 

Grafton is however a huge enthusiast of digitizing books and the possibilities this offers for research, information retrieval and teaching. The thing that worries him though is again the reading. Online reading is interactive, and thus distracting: you move in irrational paths. In a novel on paper there are no links, no distractions. Will you still have writers that write these kinds of static, thick books if people don’t read these books anymore? Writing will change with reading. But, history has shown us also that no system of publication was capable of ruining every kind of book writing production.

 

What about the analogy of history? Johannes Trithemius said that the printed book was going to ruin writing; only copying is really reading, reading means reading aloud and printing was going to destroy that contemplative and meditative form of reading. But forms of Benedictine writing and reading survived and even improved in the print world. And as it survived the move from script to print so Grafton hopes it will also make the present shift.

 

But do we still write just as well? Look at the rising use of emoticons. Emails are shorter and shorter. The online medium is not suited for that. The email isn’t the letter. The scroll still exists, as does the manuscript, but they are not what they were. Grafton’s aim is not to be totally reactionary and he does also see a lot of good coming from online forms of communication. The rise of political blogs and interactive communication is wholly good and its influence on politics is great.

 

The book is an incredible easy and convenient system. Links are nothing; they are ephemeral, where footnotes are a rich standard. After a year more than half of the links are no longer working. This is a big problem, without upkeep electronic texts don’t survive.

 

Grafton concludes by stating that notwithstanding the current developments, more books are being published and sold than ever before. But nobody is reading them.

 

Turning back to Codex in Crisis. Although I enjoyed reading the book very much, my critique of the book (or rather of the adapted essay) has to do with the, to my opinion, lack of truly opinionated argumentation from the side of the writer. I applaud his deliberation of all the different arguments pro and con the current development of the book both concerning its preproduction and mental conceivement, its birth as content depicted on a certain carrier (be it print, scroll or screen), its frequently simultaneous production or publication by a publisher, printer or the writer itself, its postproduction and dissemination into the world of reading and readers, and its consumption and role in communal coffee shops or social media sites, depicted in an amazingly concise stream of thoughts which is at the same time filled with anecdotal and detailistic reminiscences. One might even call me a big fan of this kind of overview writing, in which the scholar summarizes, analyses and distills main trends and developments, covers simultaneous occurrences and clears up conceptual difficulties.

 

Anthony Grafton does all this in his fine little booklet, but he does leave me somewhat expectant in the end. But maybe this has more to do with my own misperceptions and hopes that such an outstanding scholar may have the answer or may offer a clear path out of the problems that face the book in its present and future forms. But Grafton does not offer such an answer and of course he doesn’t, how could he, he is foremost a scholar and not a visionary and praise him for that. He is a historian, not a weather forecaster.

 

Another small comment has to do with the conservative stance his critique towards the new online book culture sometimes takes. Although he does downgrade his own critique frequently when considering the other side of the coin, his description of the (lack of) possibilities of the format of the weblog and his meager depiction of the possibilities that Open Access offers to the Humanities, strike me as a little outdated, but that might again be my own predisposition. But his conservatism in this respect does not annoy me in the way other writers and thinkers can, mainly because he gives clear examples and argumentations where, according to him, the main problems of the digital medium lie when compared to the past print situation. He only wants to preserve what is good in tradition in the middle of all this innovation going on. Grafton hopes the future will be a hybrid one, in which a laptop stands next to a pile of magazines and a stack of books, which the scholar can browse simultaneously accompanied by a nice coffee confined in one of the newly designed communal focused city libraries. This corresponds to Grafton’s feelings of melancholia towards an increasingly lost past (“It’s an old story, quiet and reassuring: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom”) but also to his excitement (though of course critical) about the new possibilities the digital world offers the book.

 

Codex in Crisis offers no question mark and no solution, only memories and hopes for a better future.

 

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.