So I’m now in the review business (and damn, it’s a lotta work…). Daniel Pritchard has a lovely new literary review site, The Critical Flame and he asked me to review an awfully important book, Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print. I’d originally heard of the book via Scott Esposito’s superb interview in Quarterly Conversation this past Spring and urge you to check it out pronto.

In the meantime, a couple of my favorite bits below, and the link itself, natch.

bq. We tend to view history in terms of one age succeeding another, the greater vanquishing the lesser, or the tawdry always winning out over the elevated. The reality, Striphas demonstrates, is that we’re a populist capitalist democracy, a world where people are trying to get ahead, and the information contained in books, and the social status books have occasionally offered, are tools for getting ahead. Books not only are part and parcel of consumer capitalism; they virtually began it, they are part of the fuel that drives it, and they are key for understanding ways in which consumer capitalism is changing and evolving, in some respects into a whole other beast. That is book culture. Books are not apart from commerce. And because that is book culture, it is far less in peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of the imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarified, and separate from the everyday (a word Striphas is fond of, more of which anon) than it actually is…

bq. [B]e it in the 1920’s or the 2000’s, not so much changes. Faced with a scenario in which they can’t cost-effectively match supply and demand, publishers seek to use the new arts and sciences of marketing to persuade people to buy more. In 1930, a consortium of trade publishers hired Edward L. Bernays, the “father of spin,” to concoct a juice-up of the book business. Quoting Bernays’ biographer:

bq. “Where there are bookshelves,” [Bernays] reasoned, “there will be books.” So he got respectable public figures to endorse the importance of books to civilization, and then he persuaded architects, contractors, and decorators to put up shelves on which to store the precious volumes.

bq. While the bookshelf trick is truly ingenious, it only reinforced what was already happening, in that the burgeoning American middle class needed to communicate “respectability and plenitude,” even during or perhaps especially during, the Great Depression “” libraries were an excellent way to accomplish that. Bernays was merely surfing an existing wave. Obviously the use of celebrities to coax America into reading is a hobby-horse of the present time too, but it is not the only echo. Bernays’ stunt in particular and the obsession with advertising in general (which Striphas catalogs for much of the twentieth century) reminds me of the current infatuation with social media. Then as now, publishers seize on the most superficial aspect of a social phenomenon — then it was the need for the growing middle class to ratify its status through books; now, it is the transformation of consumer-producer relations from monologue to dialogue. Yet, all that publishing provides is bookcases and all we offer now is Facebook fan pages for authors and publishers, as well as Twitter feeds that mostly (though, to be fair, not exclusively) still seek to push product.

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Those conversant with this site may recall the drama of That Panel at SXSW Interactive wherein a small unsuspecting group of folks from publishing ran into a brick wall of an industry reality check. Part of the larger cultural problem this revealed is that few industry insiders had ever attended the damn conference.

Based on the very healthy submission of panel proposals surrounding the topic of books, publishing, and whither both, I’m feeling rather optimistic that we might turning the corner in terms of participation. (And, as Kirk Biglione observed on PubCall last night, perhaps books/narrative might even get a little informal subtrack within the conference one of these years!)

Kassia Kroszer of Booksquare and Quartet Press has again done us all sterling service by aggregating all the related panel proposals she could find, so that you, Dear Reader, can go review them and vote for (or against) them. As I’m involved with a couple, described below, I rather hope you’ll vote for them of course but more important is that you go vote–effectively these panelists are this industry’s representatives and you should participate in deciding who represents us at SXSW!

The arty one is The Novel in 2050 with me and Joanne McNeil of The Tomorrow Museum and a couple more folks to be named later…The spiel is “Research shows reading a book for as little as six minutes may cut stress levels in half. But have Twitter-length attention spans decreased demand for novels? What is the future of the ‘non-networked’ book? This panel will debate the relevance of novels in a networked world.”

Questions to be asked include:
Will novels exist in 2050? What will they look like?
Have modern Twitter-length attention spans decreased interest in novels?
How might crowdsourcing and collaboration contribute to the creation of a novel?
What are some recent examples of networked books?
Are young people reading novels?
Does a novel communicate differently on a Kindle, iPhone, or other electronic device?
Is the Internet more of a threat to publishing than film or television were in the 20th century?
Why is technology mostly absent in the plots of contemporary novels?
How might novels use games and cross-platform storytelling?
What about novels should be preserved? What needs to change?

The businessy one is A Brave New Future for Book Publishing with me, Kevin Smokler of Booktour.com, Jared Friedman, Founder of Scribd, Kassia Kroszer herself, Jeff Seroy, SVP, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, and Debbie Stier, Associate Publisher, Harper Studio. This spiel is: Call SXSW 2009’s infamous “New Think for Old Publishers” (aka “Geeks School New York”) a missed opportunity. How did book publishing become the last media industry to embrace digital and how will this change? New publishing models, strategy and a brave future for books and we who love them. And questions ot be asked include:
How is the traditional book publishing model broken?
How did book publishing arrive at this point in its history?
What new book publishing models are already out in world?
How successful are they (Scribd, Book Oven, Stanza) thus far?
In what ways have traditional publishers embraced/made use of new publishing and marketing models?
How will publishing collaborate with other cultural industries (Film, Music, Video Games, Online Entertainment) going forward?
How has the role of the author changed and how will it continue to?
How will books be sold in the future and what will this portend for booksellers?
How will the publishing recruit young talent going forward?
What will a book publisher have to look like in 10/20 years to survive?

And, if I may recommend a third, my wife has a proposal! How I Learned To Love the DMCA. She’s an intellectual property lawyer and is offering to update us all on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, a piece of legislation which appears to be turning out to be much more helpful to online free speech that had initially be feared. Or, as she put’s it: “The DMCA strikes fear in the collective heart of the Neterati. But the way courts have interpreted the DMCA has been, in many ways, friendly to expression on the Web — dancing babies have prevailed over capricious takedown notices, and “circumvention” has been narrowly construed. This presentation will review recent case law and its implications for online speech and fair use.” Questions to be discussed include: What is the DMCA?
How did the DMCA alter the Copyright Act?
What are the DMCA “Safe Harbors”?
How does the DMCA protect content owners?
How does the DMCA recognize fair use?
What is the procedure under the DMCA for objecting to the use of content online?
How does one respond to a DMCA objection?
What are the key cases that have interpreted the DMCA?
Is the DMCA the enemy of free speech on the Web?
How might courts construe the DMCA to actually protect speech on the Web?

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Typically I reserve this space for proper-ish essays. And my tumblr for quotes too long for Twitter. But I just have to quote this, an email from Amanda Palmer to Bob Lefsetz. Almost needless to say, what Amanda says for music, I believe to be true for writing also.

Amanda Palmer:

the new art of twitter and blogging and realtime connection with hundreds and thousands of people means that the very role and meaning of the rock star is changing.

watch it happen.

i started making the music in the first place not because i wanted music, but because i wanted human connection.
music was the bridge there.

(it took me a long time to admit this to myself, because i felt guilty and like a naughty/bad/inauthentic artist when i truly discovered this, in my mid-twenties, classic crisis time).

BUT this is, hands fucking down, also why people listen, why they search, why they want art.

connection = primary.
music/art = secondary.

yes, you need a filter (like you’re often saying) to FIND the music you love and connect to (and that filter has evolved and will continue to evolve….radio-vinyl-MTV-blogs and on and on)
BUT
the music ITSELF is a filter to connect to another human expressing mind/heart that blows your skirt up and makes you feel alive, not alone, etc etc what have you.

so in a weird way, music may take the backseat and act as a filter to those you follow on twitter….not the other way around.
fucked up, but maybe not.

it’s a symbiosis. one will need the other, but don’t discount the realtime human connection as only a tool.
it is and it’s not.
for many people, it’s the thing that they NEED and WANT, the holy grail of Not Feeling Alone in a world where that used to be JUST A FANTASY as you lay in bed with your headphones on, imagining a connection with the artist and the other people who might be out there in beds just like yours, imagining the same thing.

the music simply provides the necessary room in which the miraculous happens and all these bed-worlds collide in cyberspace.

there is a reason that i often find myself wanting to sit behind twitter and connect instead of sitting at the piano and writing.
there is a reason that the fans on there would often rather be connecting than lying in bed with their headphones on.

we do both. we need both.

twitter = realtime connection.
at the very end of the day, humans crave realtime connection.

that is Why It Works.

twitter.com/amandapalmer
amandapalmer.net

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I awoke in the middle of the night last night and checked email and Twitter around 4am (they say when you can’t sleep, it’s best to get up, and tire yourself out, before returning to bed). A Twitter follow announcement came in from Kaya Oakes, with whom I had been trying to scheduling an interview off and on in 2007 and 2008–I felt a pang of guilt as I checked out her tweets and saw that the book, for which the interview was to be conducted, was done. Finished, published. Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture is more or less what the subtitle say it is. I’ll spare you the appalling copy from the publisher, which manages to be both glib and patronizing, and give you a little of Publishers Weekly‘s description:

bq. “[A] lively and highly literate explication of various American indie scenes and art forms . . . [Oakes’] focus on independent publishing and writing””provides a worthy parallel narrative to Michael Azzerad’s essential indie music history, [Our] Band Could Be Your Life . . . Oakes begins the book with a much appreciated primer on some of the intellectual forebears of her book’s central characters, including the poets Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg and the revolutionary street theater group the Diggers. As an explanation and excavation of the already fading recent past, it is essential reading.”–Publishers Weekly

I was momentarily rather bummed that I’d missed out on a chance to discuss the topic with Kaya when it dawned on me that I’d have had nothing very useful to say eighteen months ago. All is changed, changed utterly. Indie doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s dead. Which is OK, because it won. Open source, Twitter. Indie won. Etsy. The irresistible decline of major labels and network TV and corporate publishing. Indie won. We won, but at the cost to many folks personally of suddenly becoming unnecessary. This was most visible in the last few years in the magazines like Punk Planet, Kitchen Sink, Clamor. But it’ll come for us all.

You see, to the extent that indie meant anything, it was as its root word, independent. It was about seizing the means of production. Independently produced. Aesthetics can be imitated, ethics faked, attitudes mimicked, but large bureaucracies could not possibly replicate the indie production process–how could they seize the means of production? They already had it! And now the means of production has devolved yet farther down, past the indie publishers and indie record labels and pirate radio stations of yore.

This is not to say we’ve entered Nirvana. Just because we’d seized the means of production in the 1990’s didn’t mean that poverty had been eradicated, racism ended, and the intellectual property land grab thwarted. We all have to use the tools we’ve been given, find value in, rather than discard, the tools of the past, hold feet to the fire, undermine monopoly, and so on. All things we tried to do with the means of production we seized in the 90’s, we have to continue do with the means of production that technology has handed to us in the 21st century. Moore’s Law is value-neutral, apolitical, amoral, just like Gutenberg’s press. Its how we use it.

So now the phase of indie is over, now that the monopoly on the production and distribution of knowledge, culture and opinion has been broken, what next, a new phase, a drive to, perhaps, create, maintain, defend a New Authenticity arises?–Ah, am I opening myself up for derision with that…? Never mind, I toss it up there, a wounded duck. Power will try to hide behind the people, let’s use a new authenticity to stop them.

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote an editorial for Publishing Perspectives and got a rather dynamic response, including small group of commenters who were particularly exercised that I had not offered guidance on how to move forward.

In this week’s Publishers Weekly cover story, I offer exactly that guidance, although I couldn’t help but include some anecdote and sundry color. The article describes what I want to do, why I want to do it, and how I came to it. It’s not yet the perfect business model for the writing-and-reading community but it is I believe the right place to start, and critically it is designed to have powerful feedback loops, so whatever we’ll get wrong, we’ll be able to fix.

If you’d like to be a part of it, let me know. Here’s an excerpt from the Publishers Weekly piece.

Cursor…represents a new, “social” approach to publishing. To call [it] “niche” or another “independent” publishing enterprise would be a poor approximation, because those terms fail to capture the organic gurgle of culture at the heart of the venture, the exchange of insight and opinion, the flow of memes and the creation of culture in real time that is now enabled by the Internet.

My business plan is now out with investors””I will spare you the P&L numbers and just offer the broad strokes. Cursor will establish a portfolio of self-reinforcing online membership communities. To start, this includes Red Lemonade, a pop-lit-alt-cult operation, and charmQuark, a sci-fi/fantasy community.

The business will focus on developing the value of the reading and writing ecosystem, including the growth of markets for established authors, as well as engaging readers and supporting emerging writers. Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions””and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.

Other revenue opportunities include the provision of electronic distribution services to other publishers; fee-based or revenue-share software modules, especially for online writing workshops or seminars for publishers, literary journals, teaching programs; fee-based linking of writers to suppliers of publishing services, including traditional publishers and agents; corporate sponsorships and site advertising; and events and speaking fees. Yes, I envisage Cursor obtaining a larger basket of rights than is the industry standard, but that will be in exchange for shorter exclusive licensing periods. Our contracts will be limited to three-year terms with an option to renew.

The Cursor business model seeks to unite all the various existing revenues in the writing-reading ecosystem, from offering services to aspiring writers far more cheaply than most vendors to finding more ways to get more money to authors faster. It also will create highly sensitive feedback loops that will tell each community’s staff what tools and features users want, what books users think the imprint should be publishing, how the imprint could publish better.

Cursor is not designed to “save publishing,” but simply to offer the kind of services that readers and writers, established and emerging, want and the Internet enables. I believe especially strongly that the model must be viable in a world where the effective price of digital content falls to zero, and paper becomes like vinyl records or fine art prints. After all, the world is littered with things that people won’t buy at the prices their producers want to charge””like, say, the contents of remainder bins.

If recent experience is any guide, there is little reason for me to think that people, given so many other options for their leisure time, especially in the wired world, will continue to give up hours and dollars for the sake of our industry, any more than they will for big cars or daily newspapers. We are going to have to find new ways to earn those hours and dollars, and at the prices our readers””and writers””set.

I believe Cursor’s communities are a new way forward.

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So the excellent Irish publisher Eoin Purcell reviews my Publishing Perspectives editorial and provides a nice exegesis.

He is concerned about a few dimensions of it, and I thought it would make sense to respond to this, as I think that the problems he perceives lie in my poor expression of the ideas, rather than the not-poor ideas themselves.

HIs chiefest concern has to do with what he’s coined “Publishing as a Service (PaS)”–“the idea that if publishers want to survive they should adapt to become facilitators of the people who are creating and consuming content.” He contrasts this notion with one recently elaborated by Mike Shatzkin who believes “the focus should be on curating those niches and in re-engineering a publishing portfolio around a vertical segment.” He advocates that a new publishing enterprise not choose only one of those options, especially not the first only, lest “they have become software engineers.”

in large part his concern is that publishers not reinvent the wheel–“I don’t think that most publishers should spend their time creating design software or better printing presses, leave that to the odd genius who happens to also be a publisher or the software programmer.” I absolutely agree. I can’t specifically speak for Andrew Savikas (who outlines his most current thinking here in a excellent essay, Content is a Service Business) but I know that I have no intention of building anything from scratch. My understanding of Publishing as a Service Business is to distinguish it from one that sells a product in a supply chain, a peddler of tchotchkes. It does not exclude the notion that we would create physical objects, preferably gorgeous, expensive, high margin ones that are never returned and that the purchaser passes onto the next generation, it rather advocates for a mentality, a philosophy, a corporate culture, that is a service, rather than manfacturing-and-distribution one. Much in the way that Zappos is a service business.

Indeed, I concur still further with Eoin in that, as he writes, “far better for us to spend time curating and filtering content, because filtering is what the web needs.” Even more so when he argues that “that doesn’t necessarily mean gate-keeping [for] we may be facilitating the filtering-by-readers within a community, rather than choosing what floats.” Nicely put, sir!

He again warns, don’t reinvent the wheel, and I again concur. I do use (in fact in the “About” page of my blog) the admonition “Now is time to build their infrastructure” but I mean it more metaphorically. I don’t mean invent the infrastructure–I simply mean let’s take all the existing tools out there and start to put them together in the appropriate configurations. This will involve levels of customization, tweaking, both of the software itself and of the user interfaces, and of any number of business processes. And that’s the process I wish to embark on, as soon as possible. I’m not going to invent a new kind of brick, but it is time to figure out the architecture of the right kind of niche publishing houses. Indeed, my goal is to create a small portfolio of houses, in order to see how much is similar, how much is different, what the user preferences are with writers, and readers, and reader-writers in different areas and styles of story-telling.

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