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.

Share This Course has been in existence for rougly two and a half weeks. The community continues to grow. THE FRONT PAGE IS YOURS has unleashed the beast and we are posting tons of info and having great conversations. Connections are being made.

Some questions have come to my mind. As much as i enjoy the very theoretical conversations, i feel i am more focused on the way these things work and trying to help them be efficient.

In an early blog comment, Sylvano mentioned protocols. This topic has not really been explored yet. So in thinking about an idea for the blog, i wondered how exactly i should go about changing this blog in what i thought was a good way.

In the new posts flurry of Dec 7 and 8 2009 a post was made into a page and it was weird, but that was fixed quickly enough by just changing the page to a post. But what if a new page is needed? Who decides that? Mark? Definitely. But who else and why?

Searching google for hyperintelligence shows 50k+ results. In my mind number one should be a page here at STC.org. Permalinks are also very important in my opinion, for readers and search engines.

So i thought how to go about doing this? i could just do it and make the page. But i also want to see what others think first. i thought i would like to message Mark and see what he thinks. i could email him or facebook or post on the blog or comment on another post.

That brought to mind the question, Should all communication involving this community be public? Is there a need for private communication? How does this community make decisions about itself? And that led me back to protocols.

This community, my inner anarchist is dying a little, needs some protocols. Nothing law like but whos and whys. Is this project going to be just a free for all? Or will there be some sort of, for lack of a better metaphor, hierarchy? Im down for either or both. But i think these are things that need to be put into words.

How do we as participants in this group interact with each other in both our own and the groups best interest?

Share This Course on Facebook!

After Mark’s challenge this morning, at least morning here in CST, and his helpful push to get a Facebook page made, i accepted the directive and made a Share This Course / Share This Book Facebook page. i did plenty of research on whether to choose a fan page or a group. It seemed to me that a fan page would be the better choice. Groups on Facebook are like an extension of the person that created them, where pages are more autonomous with people that admin and make changes.

Right now the page has a very long unwieldy URL: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Share-This-Course-Share-This-Book/204601627568
but once we reach 100 fans we can choose a vanity URL, so become a fan.

If anyone has any comments, concerns or ideas i am very open to them. i have already included the STC blog under notes, and some links under info. i will take the responsibility of overlooking the Facebook page and making sure it fits in with the overall Share This Course way.

This is my first front page post, i hope to make many more. And thank you for your support.

At very core of Share This Course! we are redefining the notion of authorship.  This insight has already popped up a few times in the comment threads, because everybody (including myself) is wondering: who’s the author here? What the author’s job?  What are the author’s responsibilities?  Are we all authors?  If so, how does that work?

It might be best if first we define exactly what an author is.  I want to suggest a definition that may seem a bit flippant on a first read, but I reckon actually cuts to the core of the matter:  The author’s job consists of limiting possibilities. Before the tale can be told, before the narrative threads can be sewn together into an engaging story, that story must emerge from the multitude of possible stories that can be told.  The author decides which story to tell.  As that decision is made – it happens continually throughout the writing process – the author’s role becomes clearer.

There are a lot of eyes and ears now setting to work here.  Putting our minds to it, we can probably accomplish any type writing we want, short of fiction, which isn’t a group exercise.  We need to think about how to make space for all these willing and active authors to create, without it leading to chaos.  I’d like to see something that draws from our collective intelligence: something which is furiously creative, but works equally hard to limit possibilities.  In that tension – which may at times become unpleasant – we may find our way into collective authorship.

I don’t know that there’s one right way for this to work; there are many working styles, and many kinds of working groups.  Perhaps we need to practice many of them simultaneously.  With a multiplicity of minds, we need to be open to a multiplicity of paths. But can we then speak with one voice?