Share This Course!

Can You Dig It? by Pop Will Eat Itself
(embedding, ironically enough, not working for me.)

Recently, my agent told me that my next book would go to a kindle publisher and I have to say I was a little crushed. It was like hearing your movie is going “straight to video” and I felt sad that I wouldn’t have something to store in my basement.

However, my excitement mounted considerably when I began to examine the kindle publishing paradigm.

* “publishing” (per se) costs next to nothing.

* the publisher’s role is to market the book, not print & distribute it.

* the split can be MUCH better – you write, publishers market & the split with some is 50-50, from what I’m hearing.

But it gets a GREAT DEAL better than that.

Question: What can you do on the web and in a blog that you can’t do in a “book“?

Answer: *EMBED MEDIA* and this is the reality of Kindle that makes Amazon the Gutenberg of our time. (/hyperbole)

Kindle won’t – or soon won’t be – static – particularly those models armed with on-board wi-fi connections, which ups the ante of author “experience control.” Want a reader to “hear” the song your character is listening to? In a static book, you plug in the lyrics and hope for the best. In a Kindle book, you embed the file, or the video if you want them to see it – or just pull it off web on the fly.

We’re already doing this on websites and blogs all the time – it’s automatic to most of us – the difference is that a Kindle “title” will be a hypermedia “authored experience” that will contain text, sound, chats, videos, you name it, to tell its story in a linear *and* non-linear fashion.

The major obstacle to this phenomenon? Copyright & DRM, of course. In the case of music & video, the RIAA needs to step up to the plate and offer a blanket licensing agreement to EMbook publishers and creators – or they can stamp their feet and watch in horror as their media enhances the literature of the 21st century – with or without a license, because the bootleg market will just be completely out of control. (I’m in Asia – you tell me about “copyright control” and I’ll just giggle at you.)

As for me, my only regret now in publishing a Kindle book is that I didn’t write to the medium in the first place. That was then – this is now – the new one will *totally* take advantage of the format.

caveats: 1) because of tl;dr, this is truncated from the original idea, which came to me in tonglen meditation in a rush. 2) these things need a name – there’s a contest. we’ll start with EMbooks (for Embedded Media book.) 3) I use “Kindle” like kleenex – this concept is not device dependent. see #2. 4) this article is rife with error. Have at it.

Consider Mom.  In our era of nuclear families, Mom is the center of the family, the axis upon which all else depends.  Mom is the go-to person when problems arise, the remover of obstacles.  Mom makes it all better.  Mom remembers all the soccer games, the birthday presents, the holiday cards, all of the minutiae that make up modern, social family life.  Social is the key word: Mom is the center of the family because she is its most social member.  Mom’s life work, within the family, is the building and maintenance of social relationships.  When that vital link fails – when Mom gets sick, or has to work 12 hours a day just to keep the family fed – the family begins to disintegrate.  Other family members can leap into the ‘Mom gap’ –  something plenty of 21^st century Dads (and Grandmas) find themselves doing, becoming the family’s social caretaker.  Someone must fill that role, or the family will not survive, because the family is that social bond.  The social bond is what makes us uniquely human, and it is also what gives rise to the manifold forms of human groups: nuclear and extended families; tribes and clans; villages and cities; states and nations.  All of them are differing variations on the same theme, a social contract which binds us together.

The social contract within the family is both simple and comprehensive: Mom takes care of the children, sees to their needs, soothes their pains, and prepares them for participation within the world.  Mom does this by engaging with the children and with Dad, becoming the central point, the social nexus of the family.  Everyone connects to Mom, everyone shares themselves with Mom, and Mom turns that connection and that sharing to the greater advantage of everyone in the family.

Well, quite apart from the fact that almost everyone is fairly much hypnotised by all things networked, the infrastructure of society is now so heavily reliant upon it that there is, frankly, very little room for the modern equivalent of a Luddite.

Do not even attempt to imagine what it takes for you to roll on up to that hole in a wall on a suburban street to extract some readies for the big night out with your mates. Because it will hurt your brain once you realise that you’ve but done a stratospheric fly by over the surface, let alone scratch it. Just kidding. Look up banking networks on the Internet. It’s fascinating.

Anyway.

The thing is that the handloom weavers didn’t just stop existing when the first mechanised loom came onto the scene. There was a transition. But during that transition there was a resistance to change. A change that had well started, a change that was well in play and essentially past the point of holding back. Other factors were involved, to be sure, but for the purposes of my metaphorical swirl to an idea, I reckon you’ll give me a bit of free rein here.

Reading everyone’s input into this project so far confirms to me that Share This Book – whatever it will be – is a thing that embraces change.  A book that identifies the tools and the people – which is which? *smirk* – to ride this wave of change. A book that showcases the realities of hyperintelligence and hyperconnectivity (already in place now for many earthlings), which can be harnessed for no other purpose than to share with even more people the knowledge and the communities that can be tapped into to achieve a shared purpose.

We can’t smash the loom, because we love the loom.

Three weeks have passed,  The holidays have come and gone, leaving nothing but a vaguely bloated sense of self in their wake.  And the visitors have been sent home.  The question on all our minds: what’s next?

As originally envisioned, the actual process of writing Share This Book starts from today.  I am going to be drafting the introductory chapter to the work over this week – while also getting caught up on a number of other tasks.  Chapters will not appear daily; most likely they’ll appear weekly, or perhaps twice a week.  Writing is an intense business, and can’t be hurried.

The interesting work beings after these chapters get posted.  That’s when we can all set to work on them.  Do they make sense?  Do they prove the points their trying to make?  Do they flow?  What else can we add – from a wealth of possible examples, stories and anecdotes – to improve the arguments?  And what has been mistakenly left out?  The raw chapters are a starting point, a framework for discussion.  They give us something we can collaboratively build upon.

The basic argument of Share This Book is very simple: hyperconnectivity leads to hyperintelligence leads to hyperempowerment.  But saying it in a way that anyone can understand it – and believe it – will take a few hundred pages.

Sharing underlies everything.  Sharing is the engine which drives all of this forward, both as the theme of the book, and in the creation of the book.  Sharing the work, sharing the creativity, sharing the trials and triumphs, that’s what we’re in for now.  That’s what Share This Course! has always been aiming toward.  We know each other, we trust each other, we have a place to meet, and many tools to work with.  Now we begin.

Throughout the entire process leading to this point – after which I will be on holidays for three weeks and only marginally available – I have been looking to foster a community ready to participate in the creation of Share This Book.  Are we there yet?  Do we feel ready to proceed?  We are getting to know one another, sharing with one another, telling one another things of importance.  The community exists, and now this community needs purpose.

A tension exists in any community of purpose; how much should individuals intent on achieving goals try to pull that community along?  Will that be effective?  Managing any community is, proverbially, like herding cats.  You can’t tell them where to go, or what to do.  But you can lure them with a tasty treat.  If you want to herd cats, try catnip.

For the last three weeks you’ve been given some tidbits of my own thinking, the ideas which underpin my vision for Share This Book.  When I return in January, I will begin drafting the book, starting with the introduction.  As I complete drafts of various sections, I will post them to this blog.  What happens once these drafts leave my hands is impossible for me to know.  I expect there will be a feedback between myself and this community which will shape the writing process as it happens.

It is my hope that this blog becomes a place where we can all discuss the ideas explored in these chapters. Share This Course! then becomes something the book could never hope to be, and these two, side-by-side (together with the wiki), compose a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.  So, watch this space.  We’ve now got everything we need in place for something wonderful to happen.

Three weeks ago I launched Share This Course!, with some idea of where 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 definitively – but a provisional answer would allow us to move forward into the next phase, the actual writing of the text of Share This Book.

It’s unclear whether we’re any closer to this goal than when we started, at least in an explicit sense.  There’s no sense that anything has been resolved.  Instead, our world has perceptibly broadened.  New questions arise, leading to still more questions, and so on.  Light is streaming in, a good thing, but, equally, blinding us in our journey toward our goal.  What is to be done?

On the other hand, Share This Course! is ‘dogfooding’, i.e. putting its methodology into practice.  The necessary first step, the establishment of hyperconnectivity between like-minded individuals, has been a complete success.  There are not many of us deeply involved – perhaps fifteen out of the over sixty signed up to this blog – but that is more than enough.  This hyperconnectivity has overflowed into throughout the blog and over into a wiki and Google Wave.  That’s a sign of vitality.

We need not worry about taming this intensity and curiosity, but we must give it direction.  We are exploring sharing in all its aspects at present.  That will eventually roll back into a focus on the sharing of culture, knowledge and power, the subject of Share This Book.  Take a moment and look at how far we’ve come. We are here, together.  Together we are creating something wonderful.  Thank you.

I feel bold in sharing like this – perhaps by tomorrow I will not be interested in a FAQ and I will move on to something else.  Or perhaps I will gather up all the other questions I’ve posted it and put them here.  the perma-link is already /the-faq/ so it wouldn’t be a bad place to put it.

Who will edit this once it’s done?

Will that be a shared process as well?

If yes, will that potentially culminate in multiple edits?

Will everyone have their own “version of events”?

Will everyone have their own unique copy of “the book” which will reflect their experience of it?

Do multiple versions of the same book imply novelty or chaos?

Can a multiple-person author book with multiple versions ever have a definitive version?

Do I have to raise my hand to go to the bathroom?