Share This Course!

In all the rush to get everything ready for the Sydney Writers’ Festival, I forgot to mention a little project: I wrote a 144-page book in 90 minutes, so that I could get it overnight printed and bound and have it in my hand to flash around on my various festival panels.  It worked a treat.  But of course, I also did an electronic version of this book – two, actually, one in PDF format, the other in ePub format – so that anyone can freely have a copy of it.

If you’d like your own copy, click here.

Two weeks ago, Marcus Westbury and I held a panel at the Sydney Writers’ Festival titled “The Future of Publishing”.  When I scheduled this panel, I thought we’d be well done with Share This Book.   And I’d be able to report on how it all went.

Live and learn.

Instead I took the lessons and offered them up to the standing-room-only crowd of two hundred.   Both of us spoke for about 15 minutes apiece, then we took questions from a very interested and engaged audience.

If you’d like to hear my talk, click here.

If you’d like to hear Marcus’ talk, click here.

Please share your reactions to what we had to say!

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.

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.

Birds On Power Lines

Links, which may be of interest for the Share This Course project.  At the very least, it’s a capture of some the information that we have come across and may inspire other ideas, thoughts or discussions.  It’s a list to which we can add, review for relevance and organise as we explore sharing.  It is also a bunch of stuff that may potentially be useful for the creation of a bibliography for the book.

Sharing and online culture

• The Hacker Ethic – Wikipedia Entry
  • “According to Levy’s account, sharing was the norm and expected within the non-corporate hacker culture. The principle of sharing stemmed from the atmosphere and resources at MIT. During the early days of computers and programming, the hackers at MIT would develop a program and share it.”
• File Sharing History – Life before bit torrents…
  • “Contrary to what people may think, there’s a lot to talk about file sharing history, especially since it all started before the P2P technology came crashing in”
• Free Software Foundation – The proper sense of free.
  • “The free software movement is one the most successful social movements to emerge in the past 25 years, driven by a worldwide community of ethical programmers dedicated to freedom and sharing.”

The Academic Perspective

• The New Sharing Ethic in Cyberspace – Andrés Guadamuz, Journal of World Intellectual Property, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp.129-137, 2002.
  • “The Internet presents us with an impressive tool for distributing intellectual creations to the widest possible audience. In Cyberspace we are starting to witness the diluting of authorship by the practice of legions of writers, musicians, inventors and artists that see the Internet as the best medium in which to present the products of their intellectual labour, even if it means to do it for free.”
• Social Sharing and Risk Reduction – Evolution and Human Behavior
  • “Sharing important resources widely beyond direct kin-group members is one of the core features characterizing human societies. Moreover, generalized exchange involving many community members (e.g., meat-sharing in bands) seems to be a uniquely human practice.”

Talks on sharing

• Radical Abundance – Douglas Rushkoff asks: How We Get Past “Free” and Learn to Exchange Value Again.
  • “…my clearest articulation yet of how we’re using an obsolete operating system for money, optimized for a pre-Internet economy.”

The Book – what is it?

• Copy Fight: Cory Doctorow’s struggle to make books free – Mark Medley, National Post, Monday, November 16, 2009
  • “It’s his commitment and encouragement of sharing that makes Doctorow a thorn in the side of some in the publishing industry (though it should be noted his own publisher, Tor, is part of Macmillan, which in turn is a subsidiary of the massive German conglomerate Holtzbrinck). He wants his books to be read, he wants his books to be passed around and he wants his books to be copied.”
• The Institute for the Future of the Book – A web site for a think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens.
  • “Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress.
• A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century by Sara Lloyd
  • “We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain. We will need to recognise that readers are also writers and opinion formers and that those operate online within and across networks.”

Authorship

• Shared Authorship: Dispersal of the Artist in Electronic Fields – Raivo Kelomees, Studies on Art and Architecture (Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi), issue: 3 / 2007, pages: 82­84
  • “The revolt against authorship, originality, everything made with the author’s own hands, is one of the features of 20th century art, perfectly realised in today’s environment of the Internet and interactive art.”
• In defence of the Author – Justin Keverne, Groping the Elephant – Pragmatic fumbles in the darkness by a Games Industry outsider.
  • “Games need authors. The only thing left to discuss is how visible those authors should be and that’s a topic that will keep us going for the next few years at least.”

Sharing – implementations online

• Global Ideas Bank – A web site that is about sharing ideas.
  • “The Global Ideas Bank aims to promote and disseminate good creative ideas to improve society. It further aims to encourage the public to generate these ideas, to participate in the problem-solving process.”
• Kelvin Grove Urban Village – A web site for a Master Planned Community in Brisbane, which is a partnership between the Queensland Government and the Queensland University of Technology.
  • “The Kelvin Grove Urban Village site has a rich and varied history, including its Indigenous, military, educational, residential and natural history. The Sharing Stories project has been developed to inform the community on the Village’s history.”
• Pool – A web site for creative collaboration
  • “ABC is building an online ‘town square’ for all Australians. Pool is a collaborative space where audiences become ‘co-creators’.  It’s a place to share and talk about creative work – music, photos, videos, documentaries, interviews, animations and more.”
• a.aaaarg.org – access texts and discuss them.
  • “AAAARG is a conversation platform – at different times it performs as a school, or a reading group, or a journal.  AAAARG was created with the intention of developing critical discourse outside of an institutional framework. But rather than thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.”

Giving – when organisations share

• MIT opencourseware – Access university material free.
  • “MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.”
• TED – high quality videos for the mind.
  • “On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free.”

Because I like  it

• Short History of Sharing – A cartoon.
  • On lessons from when we were young.

The goal of Share This Course is twofold:

• First, to have a deep conversation about what sharing is, what sharing means in the context of the book, what sharing means to the idea of the author, and what sharing means for publishing.  All of these things become quite different when the lessons of the 21^st century are applied to them.  Thus far, hardly anyone has applied the lessons of sharing to these issues and processes.  We’ll be breaking some new ground here, having a conversation – and an exploration – which is important for the future.  This conversation is going to happen right here, on this blog, starting on the 21^st of November.  I’m hoping that it will continue throughout the entire project.  By the end of the first three weeks we may have some clarity – at least in terms of this project – on how to proceed.
• Second, to put that conversation to work in the creation of a real, living text: Share This Book.  If we’ve done our work well in the first stage of our efforts, we will be able to take our work and apply it to our efforts in collaborative creation.  We should be able to work together, as a group, around the process of writing, editing, and (eventually) publishing the book.  That is also going to happen here on this blog, starting on the 4^th of January 2010.

This is just as much about process as it is about product. We will be capturing all of our discussions, thoughts, arguments, and agreements.  These represent as much real work and real value as any chapter from Share This Book.  We will all be learning something new about how to collaborate creatively in a production.  And that’s something we all need to know.

The institutions which provided the steady and monotonous diet of media throughout the 20^th century are collapsing, undone by a sudden, unexpected and comprehensive competition from the public they aim to serve.  We have become our own publishers, broadcasters, and creators.

We find ourselves turning to new systems of production which allow for ever-larger and ever-more-potent groups of individuals to come together in common cause around a project of shared, creative production.  Wikipedia is one such example of a successful project, but it is far from the only one.  I propose to launch another such project, Share This Book.

Share This Book must be an example of the type of culture it attempts to articulate.  I intend to open up the creative process, to make sharing not just the core idea of the book, but the way the book comes into being.  Although I come to this project with an idea, the realization of this idea must be driven by a community willing to share resources, intelligence, and capabilities.

In this new world, the role of the author is redefined; not just a contributor, editor, or cheerleader, yet something of all three.   I will be a peer among equals, sharing my vision in order to bring it to life.  I hope others will come forward and share their own vision, enthusiasm and creativity, working with me to carry the project through to a successful conclusion.

The days of the singular author, toiling in seclusion are being supplanted by an energized community, working toward a common goal.  This is the shared landscape where we will be creating for the rest of our lives.  This is all new, but it is all possible.  With your help.