What is a book?
More precisely, what is this book? In the last few years the ‘book’ has come to live on a continuum between very old-fashioned written-edited-printed-bound-distributed book as we’ve known them for the last 560 years, and something far more fungible, flexible and just plain different. Is Wikipedia a book? What about Boing Boing? When Charles Stross released Accelerando online in PDF format – to drive sales of physical copies – did he undermine or accentuate the qualities that make a book a book?
If I were approaching Share This Book in the old-fashioned way, I’d write a proposal, submit it to my agent who’d then pass it along to a publisher. There I’d be handed to an editor who would guide me through the process of crafting the book. After I handed in the last manuscript page, about a year would pass before the text saw publication. In the meantime, the marketing machinery would crank up to promote the book to booksellers and readers. With luck, a few thousand copies would get sold.
That’s how The Playful World was created, a decade ago. Things have changed a lot since then. What hasn’t changed is my desire to tell a story, to weave a narrative that makes sense and frames current developments in a way that the interested layperson can understand. I don’t think you get that from a wiki or a blog; they’re different forms with different ends. But that doesn’t mean that Share This Book can’t steal from those forms where it makes sense. If our process is new, our product should reflect it. And if we end up with a hypertext – as seems reasonable for a book that will reach readers in 2010 – that simply means that readers of a printed version will be encouraged to explore the online version.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 6:30 am and is filed under Book, Share This Book, Share This Course. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 24th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
what sorts of things should we be writing for the book? stories or examples of sharing? or getting/researching references from other books/articles? or will we have general discussions and see what comes out of these & then develop these ideas/paths?
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mpesce Reply:
November 24th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
@kath, I don’t think we have a really good answer to this question yet, but it actually points to the article I will be posting tomorrow, about what is the idea of the author in this context. If we can get square with that, perhaps our roles and tasks will start to become clearer.
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psychegram Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 8:31 am
@kath, Why not all of the above?
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kath Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 10:15 am
@psychegram, yeah I’m happy with all of the above
just getting an idea of the type of content & structure we should be going for
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November 24th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
A Book is a Battery.
Battery: an electrochemical device that stores potential for electricity to flow when an electrical circuit is completed.
Book: a collection of “content” comprising the potential for thoughts to flow when the circuit of attention is completed.
If “Book” is to be redefined — e.g. if BoingBoing can be considered “a book” — the sense of shared experience as constituting “You read the words that I read” will have to fall away.
What’s left to call “shared experience”?
Style. Mood. Tendency. Voice.
We move from defining the Book by its programmatic sequence (a sequence of textual words read in the same order by every reader) into defining a Book by its statistical likelihoods, boundaries, and edge conditions.
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mpesce Reply:
November 24th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
@nthmost, I like the idea of a book as a battery; it’s functional. It gives us a yardstick. ‘Does this make current flow between your ears?’
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November 24th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Will be interested to see how this project pans out. Will participate to the best of my skill and time.
The potential for connectivity and community is interesting and may produce an interesting take on collaboration.
Regards
vicki
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November 24th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
I love books.
I love that they come in different forms (hardback, paperback, spring-bound, even digital). Mostly the form suits the content – nothing quite like wrestling with a large hardbound dictionary.
You spoke about the process, the product, and the people (not the least of which the author which we will unpack tomorrow). Will there be talk about ‘tools’? What tools – apart from this blog – do you foresee/predict might be used? Will the book be multimedia, at least on its digital form assuming it gets printed?
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mpesce Reply:
November 24th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
@malyn, yes, there will be talk of tools, absolutely. We are already using one tool – a blog – but there are many other tools in the potential toolkit, including wikis, email, Google Wave, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc.
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November 24th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
I would like to explore a less traditional, non-linear narrative – the reader picks their way through those parts of the story that interest them – a book can be many things to many people, why can this book not do the same thing? We all to often imagine that a book must have a beginning, a middle and an end – why can it not have a number of middles and a plethora of endings – after all the notion of sharing is about making pathways between a need and a resource, an ask and an answer. Ideas in this blog are divergent, do not follow a linear path – the reader dives off into areas that are interesting to them (the liberty of hypertext I guess) is it or some variation of it possible in a bound volume I wonder? What would it look like and how would a reader approach it?
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mpesce Reply:
November 24th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
@wonko, your approach is very similar to that described by Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. They wrote a book which they advised you should read the beginning – a longish essay outlining their main theses – then the internal chapters could be read in any order you like, followed by the concluding chapter. This makes the book a fun and interesting read.
It is certainly one valid approach.
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mrdomino Reply:
November 24th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
@mpesce, as another data point, some math textbooks open with dependency diagrams indicating which sections are dependent on what previous material. So for instance, in order to get to the section on non-commutative rings, you first have to read about rings, which depend on groups, which depend on basic set theory. I’ve found this extremely useful for learning formal math, but it might also have a place in less rigorous contexts (“this is an examination of this concept that we’ve talked about previously”; or even, “this narrative takes place in the context of these prior events.”)
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ctucker Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 2:09 am
@mrdomino, I really like this idea of dependency diagrams. Ezra Pound created something similar, regarding modernist literature, in his “ABC’s of Reading.”
I will be interested to see what we come up with as fundamental concepts in contrast to contextual information for thinking about the concepts critically.
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kyledstedman Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 3:31 am
@mrdomino, I really love the dependency diagram. My experience with nonlinear texts (say, this article) is that I tend to really want to read in the “right order”–even though I’ve been told that there isn’t a right order! So I was about to post a question about how we impose some flexible, rubber structure without losing the possibility for hypertext, and you suggested a stellar answer.
Relatedly, I often feel similar feelings when playing video games. When I played Final Fantasy VII a few years back, I remember that after I left the big city I went wherever felt most logical to me, and only later did someone tell me that I had missed an awesome opportunity for items and a new character, simply because of my decision to wander in one direction and not another. Even though I liked the loose gameplay, I even more wanted the feeling of “getting it all”–but I wanted to get it all without the help of a strategy guide. That’s going to be an interesting struggle with this book: helping people out without making them feel like they’re getting a “cheat” that they don’t want.
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ctucker Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 4:10 am
@kyledstedman, This reminds me of some of my first remembered experiences sharing… learning from other kids where the warps were in Super Mario Bros, the Capcom code, oh Nintendo.
I read a blog post about a visit to *famous American architect’s* (FLW?) creation, during which all the guests were embarrassed to find they had gotten two rooms ahead of the tour guide. She kindly pointed out that the sense of momentum had been intentionally created, the guides just get used to it.
I think that hypertext’s inherent non-linearity (from embedded links to float-over annotations) along with a well-crafted structure can ensure that readers have the sense of freedom without getting lost.
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psychegram Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 8:53 am
@mrdomino, That’s a fascinating idea, one that would be well applied to a number of other fields. In fact an interesting project (not for us, though, outside the scope) would be to create such a map for Wikipedia. Give users individual accounts for using the map, and you could very easily do away with the necessity of ‘testing’ people in a formal academic sense as what they had learned, in what order and in what depth would be meticulously detailed.
Bringing it back to the book … I suppose it would depend on what sort of things come out in the process. Will the material be so dense as to necessitate a pseudo-linear learning process, or will it be stand-alone articles grouped around a common theme? I suspect it will depend on the sub-topic in question.
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mpesce Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 11:51 am
@psychegram, I doubt the material will be that dense. I’ve been lecturing on this subject for coming on four years now to all sorts of lay audiences. There are ways into the material which are welcoming. That said, it can quickly get very dense and very heady — if you want it to. And perhaps that’s the clue to the multiplicity here: both paths, the facile and the complex, must be left open to the reader.
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ctucker Reply:
November 26th, 2009 at 1:28 am
@mpesce, In its original conception, E.O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life had a slider bar, which would automatically adjust the depth of text presented. A simulation appears somewhere in episode of Bill Moyer’s Journal. Reminds me of the difference between a Children’s Illustrated Classic and the actual book.
kath Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
@mrdomino, I like your dependency diagram – have you tried freemind? it’s mind mapping software, but there’s arrows you can add to link it like the dependency diagram. it’s very useful for brainstorming & quick to use/edit. I use it a lot at work or mapping out home projects & keeping track of lists/items (sometimes instead of powerpoint for presentations too)
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November 24th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
we’ve been talking about narratives and videos on an art video list I’m on called Artists in the Cloud. not sure if you can get to this thread, but if you can, the Interactive Sketch thread might be of interest to this discussion
one example is http://thewhalehunt.org – which is an amazing web project – from the artists’ statement page :
First, to experiment with a new interface for human storytelling. The photographs are presented in a framework that tells the moment-to-moment story of the whale hunt. The full sequence of images is represented as a medical heartbeat graph along the bottom edge of the screen, its magnitude at each point indicating the photographic frequency (and thus the level of excitement) at that moment in time. A series of filters can be used to restrict this heartbeat timeline, isolating the many sub stories occurring within the larger narrative (the story of blood, the story of the captain, the story of the arctic ocean, etc.). Each viewer will experience the whale hunt narrative differently, and not necessarily in a linear fashion, constructing his or her own understanding of the experience.
/just tidied up the formatting now the edit button is here
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psychegram Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 9:00 am
@kath, Thanks for the whale hunt, Kath. Very cool.
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November 24th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Well, are we asking the right question? A piece by Hugh McGuire from September, 2009, at the Huffington Post ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hugh-mcguire/what-is-a-book_b_299948.html ) suggests the question should probably be, what are books for?
Interesting question. One that makes me swiftly depart from the source article and play a riff to our task at hand here.
Now, the book has often been described as being capable of taking the reader on a journey to another place, another time and to another experience. More than that, with a good book the reader is really there and really experiencing the narrative flow.
Or if you like, we could consider text on paper as a fairly remarkable low tech virtual reality machine.
But like a hole punched pianola roll, the narrative flow is the same each time you pass yourself through the pages. This is a little unfair, as you know, since the rereading of a book after some time can initiate a new and varied experience of the text. But in a sense, that really is pointing to a different pianola, not a different play roll.
Anyway, this makes me compelled to draw in the notion of hyperconnectivity that @mpesce has written about.
You see, for someone sitting by the fire in the 19th century, reading a book by candle light, the book is not only providing a virtual reality experience of a story.
That book is also a virtual reality experience of hyperconnectivity.
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mpesce Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 11:53 am
@Sylvano, text is the first virtual reality. No doubt about it. And part of my joy as an author – a joy that I hope we don’t lose in our drive toward community – is taking people into a world that I’ve created. There is magic and wonder in that, something that we shouldn’t lose.
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November 24th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
>> what are books for?
(thinking/writing out loud..)
when I think of a book I think of a voice or an outlet for my internal voice (consciousness? spirit? mind?) – when writing, it’s that voice that speaks. which is different to when I’m speaking or taking a photo or video.
when speaking I think I’m more disjointed (though my writing is disjointed too
, especially in a conversation – people cut off others and sentences are left half finished but the meaning is still understood by everyone in the conversation (pending any language differences barriers, but even that is an interesting behaviour I noticed more whilst overseas and at work with non-native English speakers as I spoke more slowly and clearly and often more loudly (unnecessarily).
when videoing or photographing, to me, it’s like trying to capture a moment – to trigger a memory later – even though you never capture the whole moment exactly, or even interpret it the same as others who might see it. everyone’s perception is different & the way they see colours, shapes, which details they notice/focus on.
I don’t know, with writing it’s like there’s a different “me” having a voice. often I write things that are easier to say in writing than in spoken voice (probably a confidence issue), though I think sometimes this is practice for saying it – getting the ideas out there.
not sure if that makes sense or if I wrote it clearly enough. someone else can probably say what the academic term for this is in 1-2 sentences
I like books as words on paper. but I also like the hyperconnectivity ofsome of the more experimental “books”. if they are/can be called books also.
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kath Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
@kath, I wrote the above message whilst really tired before going to sleep last night. & I had these other thoughts too which I wrote in my notebook as I’d shutdown the computer by then. forgive me if they are disjointed also.
book with pictures
- I think it can be important to have pictures in the books too as a type of universal language to help share your message & intent, not in the ‘dumbing down the book’ type sense. even beautiful design / typefaces / layout can help with this and make the book an image in itself. I think the mind works best with images – at least mine tends too, perhaps it’s a female-brain thing? for example, if you don’t read, write or speak the language that the book is written in, it’s still possible to get a feel for the book from the pictures/design. as an example, when I was living in Israel & India (different periods obviously), and feeling homesick I’d end up in bookstores and see some of the beautiful books – even with only a few English words (unfortunately that’s all I can speak/read). it was comforting in a way. (also because I was traveling light and pdfs were my ‘books’, not paper copies). at times it felt like I’d lost my language, as I’d spent so much time speaking with non-native English speaking people (few years), that even the way I normally/used to speak was different as I’d speak slower, more clearly, sometimes (unnecessarily) louder, more carefully pronounced so people could understand me, and it was usually in a disjointed, abbreviated English vernacular so even my vocab changed. it took a while to get used to speaking English again once home (my brain had to think more at times). so when I felt like this, I was looking out for fragments of words – even the shapes of the letters. I’d look at the other languages (which I should have learned) and see images of the letters but have no meaning of the words. at times it was a matter of pattern recognition. so seeing books with some related pictures or artwork, really helped me get a feel of the books, and even the places and types of authors in those places. the pictures were like a shared universal language if that makes sense. I think the pictures in a book can help share the meaning of the work, or give you the gist of it, along with the chapter headings/contents page if you can read this – almost like how you preview a song/album at a record store by playing the first few seconds or skipping through it to see if you’d like the album – you get a feel for it. the “picture is a thousand words” saying. so I think it’d be great to include some pictures in the book?
& Bobby Campbell’s are some of the best!
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ctucker Reply:
November 26th, 2009 at 1:58 am
@kath, I completely agree with your emphasis on imagery! Will Eisner worked for the U.S. Army creating instructional comic strips, their research indicated that soldiers retained more information when text and image accompanied each other. Though I didn’t find a direct source “Some Uses of Visual Aids in the Army” claims:
Not just a female-brain thing at all!
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November 25th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Thinking as specifically as possible about what it is that we’re attempting to create here: ’sharing’ as such is a state of mind, more than anything else. A way of being, not a set of techniques … techniques come later. mrdomino’s dependency diagram idea would be applicable, perhaps invaluable even, for that sort of thing (which I expect ultimately will comprise the lions share of the book.)
But as to the state of mind issue, this is primarily a psychospiritual one, and communicating it is far more about inducing ‘ah-hah’ moments in the reader than it is about laying down a behavioural recipe or a reasoned philosophical argument. We are god is us … put another way, you aren’t just you, you’re your community, your environment, your world. What you give to the world will be given back, and more (because you can never give as much as the world can) … and what you sell to it, you must pay for (and in the end, will always pay more dearly than any profit you might have made.)
So I’d suggest the project have (at least) two broad aims: one, to suggest practical ways in which a society based on sharing might be (self)-organized; two, to induce that ‘ah-hah’ moment in readers. Ideally the two would be interwoven as seamlessly as possible.
I came across this group at an underground bookstore in Toronto:
http://www.crimethinc.com/
CrimethInc.’s book ‘Expect Resistance’ was a fascinating read, the story of the antiglobalization movement as told by those most deeply involved. The authors are anonymous (these are masked anarchists keep in mind) but it seems to have been written by several people, at least: a loose narrative structure is interwoven with political or philosophical essays and stream of consciousness pieces and a fair bit of the frankly unclassifiable, all completely disparate yet focused like a laser beam on a single topic: revolution.
Am I suggesting we create something like this? Not exactly. The CrimethInc style is guaranteed to turn off more people than it activates, exactly the opposite of what sharing as such is all about. Readability is a key issue, as is accessibility, as is depth of analysis, as is practical utility. We’re trying to create something that will be part philosophical treatise, part manifesto, and part technical manual: a book that will open the doors to a new society, whilst simultaneously providing the operating manual for it.
Or am I getting ahead of myself?
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mpesce Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 11:55 am
@psychegram, and I quote:
“We’re trying to create something that will be part philosophical treatise, part manifesto, and part technical manual: a book that will open the doors to a new society, whilst simultaneously providing the operating manual for it.”
Yes, please!!!
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November 26th, 2009 at 5:04 am
These are some things that sprung to mind while reading through everyone’s posts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footnote#Footnotes_as_a_literary_device
http://changingminds.org/techniques/language/metaphor/pataphor.htm
These two things lead to a nesting of possible stories. This can lead to an infinite number of branching stories or links and allusions. I think these two basic things lead to an infinite number of possible directions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus
Like the above book, I think it doesn’t necessarily all have to have a point. Art for art’s sake.
They ran this thing here called Free Art Friday a few months ago. I think it’s a global thing. Basically, you create a piece of art and you put it somewhere in the city for anyone to pick up. You attach a little piece of paper to it, or nearby, that has your contact details, in case someone wants to contratulate you for the work they found.
http://freeartfridayireland.wordpress.com/
AD
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mpesce Reply:
November 26th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
@22AD, everything branches. That is the essence of the book – it is always and has ever been a hypertext. We couldn’t make that explicit until a handful of years ago. Before that books existed in a virtual hypertext, where readers who were well-read could ‘get’ the links. (By this standard, James Joyce was arguably the most-well-read person who ever lived.)
Now we make the links explicit. Does this add to the reading experience or distract us from it? Do we want to know there’s more just a click away when there’s more just on the next page?
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November 26th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
A friend sent me the link about this so thought I would join in as best I can. I recently wrote an essay about the book and the publishing industry… it was all about how the process is no longer linear; It is now more in the way of the circularity of the network. I thought therefore that this might prove to be an interesting exercise to be involved in.
Sara Lloyd from pac Macmillan Publishers talks alot about the way the publishing industry is going to have to change. Her article is at:
http://thedigitalist.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/a-book-publishers-manifesto-for-the-21st-century.pdf
Sorry about the lack of hyperlink, not overly familiar with Wordpress.
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mpesce Reply:
November 26th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
@Lisa, wow, what a great resource. Thanks for this!
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Sylvano Reply:
November 26th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
@mpesce, Agreed. An excellent read and the link is now in the Sharing Links page, of course.
There are many fine sentences to examine as a part of our project, such as:
“Whilst the book continues to be viewed as a definable object within covers, as a singular ‘unit’, publishers will continue to limit their role in its production and distribution, and this is a sure fire way for publishers to write themselves out of the future of content creation and dissemination.”
Thanks @Lisa
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November 29th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Share This Course! » Blog Archive » Readers or doers? says:[...] final paragraph of psychegram’s recent comment in response to Mark’s What is a Book? posting is a solid stab at describing what it is we may [...]
December 10th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
I hope we can make a Share This Book that will work on the forthcoming Apple Tablet – looks amazing! I think I’ll skip the kindle for this.. (though I don’t think I’ll be watching sports illustrated on it)
future of the book : Apple tablet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntyXvLnxyXk
and if they use a special format, we could start looking at this earlier so the book could be one of the fewer available at launch? sometimes people buy these devices and there’s not a lot of content available yet. I haven’t read too much about them yet- hopefully they’ll accept ’standard’ web/pdf docs
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Sylvano Reply:
December 10th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
@kath, good point. I think Apple should be supplying us an advance release unit for critical content layout testing. One per Share This Course participant!
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ctucker Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 2:17 am
@Sylvano, Second!
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December 12th, 2009 at 4:38 am
Share This Course! » Blog Archive » 21 Days Later says:[...] to go and how to get there. By this point in time we were to have sorted out the big questions: what is a book, what is an author, what is publishing? Of course, these questions can never be answered [...]