At the recent Online Information 2009 event in
Inspired by Stephen E. Arnold's series of books on Google - in my humble opinion required reading for anyone in the publishing industry - www.infonortics.com/publications/google/google-trilogy.html - and by articles by Noah Richler and Alex Hutchinson in the November 2009 issue of The Walrus, I selected as a key theme the increasingly dynamic - in some cases fleeting - nature of publishing and the varying involvement and effort of users in the process.
For starters, publishing is a means to an end - we don't value or pay for it in its own right. We pay to find things, learn, be entertained, and so on. Therefore, publishing must evolve to meet the demands of our evolving styles living, learning, researching, and communicating. Contrast the old style of publishing - going from hand writing through typesetting through printing, where the consumer had no participation in the process until the book or journal issue was in hand - versus the contemporary wiki and annotation mechanisms allowing for participation throughout the process of making information accessible. Come to think of it, the distinction between "public" and "published" is blurring.
Compare the use of an old fashioned map - where the user must interpret a two-dimensional image from above, transform it into a mental three-dimensional image "from the side" and devise a strategy for getting from point A to point B - with today's GPS commands getting truck drivers stuck in unsuitable narrow alleys. We like the convenience of the GPS systems, but as Alex Hutchinson suggested in "Global Impositioning Systems" (http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.11-health-global-impositioning-systems/, they may lead us to abdicate judgment.
The ever smaller granularity of published items - $.99 individual book chapters at Shortcovers.com, personalized selections of various materials at Bookriff.com to make one-of-a-kind assemblies - has consequences of various kinds, one being our ability to trace them. There is another implication: Noah Richler in "Turning the Page" http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.11-business-turning-the-page/ refers to the stunning effect of the consignment scheme, invented by Max Schuster in the 1930s and saving the book publishing industry then: That scheme sees 24 million more books trucked around to book stores in Canada each year than are sold. That's 200,000 lost trees, lots of fuel, and lots of book pulp. Could more kindle reading save some of those trees?
To be continued …
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