The latest numbers from Bowker are extraordinary: In 2002 there were 215,000 books published in the USA, and a further 32,693 print-on-demand title (short-runs, self-published etc).

In 2008, traditional publishers put out 275,000 books; but there was a huge surge in print-on-demand titles, and at 285,000, for the first time there were more non-traditionally published books than traditionally published.

By 2009, the whole applecart was upside down: 288,000 books published traditionally, and 764,000 (!) self-published and print-on-demand books. That doesn’t include, as far as I can tell, the thousands of ebooks getting published at places like Smashwords.

Even if you forget about the self-published books, since 2002 we’ve seen a 105% increase in poetry and drama books (11,766), 80% increase in the number of biographies published (12,313), an 80% increase in general fiction titles (45,181), a 75% increase in literature (10,843), a 50% increase in religion titles (19,310), and a 30% increase in science books (15.428). There have been declines in only three of the twenty-five categories tracked by Bowker: Agriculture (down 6%), computers (down 32%), and languages (down 32%). Across the spectrum, we’ve seen a 32% increase in all titles published since 2002, all without an appreciable increase (that I know of) in the number of people who actually buy books, let alone read them.
Add to this significant growth the 764,000 (!!!) non-traditionally-published books, and you can see where the fundamental problem for publishing lies: there are so many books out there, and a limited number of readers.

Supply Makes Demand Look Puny

We have a massive and growing supply and demand imbalance in the book business. And, as the technologies for creating and distributing books becomes trivial, the supply of books is just going to keep growing exponentially. There is a whole other article to write about the business implications of these numbers, but I’m interested here in some ideas about how our info systems might manage this huge pile of books. That is, how are people going to sift through all these books to find what they want?

[more over at O'Reilly...]

I just published my thoughts about this on O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing blog. The key points are:

The key insights behind Book Oven were the following:

* publishing a book is (almost always) a collaborative enterprise
* online tools (should) make collaboration on making books easy(er)
* if you build a “book” in the cloud, using structured mark-up, then expression of that book in various forms (print, epub, pdf, mobipocket, html, etc), on various devices (including paper & print) becomes arbitrary, and should be nearly trivial
* further, if the “book” exists in the cloud, then the range of things that can be done with this “book” multiplies significantly
* if a system built on these ideals is implemented well, it will be transformative, both for professional publishing workflows, and for the emergence of a new grassroots of indie publishing.

I am still deeply committed to this vision. But I have shifted towards a belief that the above-described platform should be open source. Or at least, an open source version of such should exist.

And:

Wordpress, it seems, is an ideal candidate as a platform on which to build an open source, online, webby, book-publishing system. There may be other likely candidates, but Wordpress has the following characteristic which suggest to me that it is an excellent place to start:

* it is a familiar and comfortable tool to most writers and publishers who are at all engaged online
* it is a stable platform that can handle just about any scale of traffic you can throw at it (the New York Times, for instance, runs on a heavily-hacked version of Wordpress)
* it is open source
* through its plugin architecture, it is infinitely extensible
* through its template architecture, it is infinitely stylable
* through Wordpress Mu, it isinfinitely scalable it has a huge, world-wide community of committed developers
* existing plugins and plugin suites already achieve much of what would bewanted in a Wordpress-based book publishing system.

And elaborating more fully, here is a list of plugins such a system would need:

1. robust version control
2. digress.it (based on the old commentpress)- to allow para by para commenting for editors, and later, if desired, for readers
3. wordpress –> epub conversion
4. wordpress –> ~LaTeX –> print-ready pdf conversion (or similar)
5. wordpress –> InDesign-compliant mark-up conversion
6. book-friendly front-end template(s) (including Table of Contents, Title page etc)
7. generation of a download/(sales?) page that lists available formats (epub, html, pdf etc)
8. table of contents generator
9. a book metadata generation/management tool (ONYX, OPDS compliant?)
10. …etc.

This list of plugins can continue, subject to the interest of developers, and the needs of users of such a system.

You can read the whole thing here.

And props to John Maxwell and his students at the Simon Fraser Masters of Publishing Program for actually building a protoype and publishing a book with it. Also, do head over to Leanpub.com and see another implementation of something similar.

The distinction between “the internet” & “books” is totally totally arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now.

The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model allows a wide network of publishers, booksellers, libraries, and even authors to make their catalogs of books available directly to readers through their laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. BookServer facilitates pay transactions, borrowing books from libraries, and downloading free, publicly accessible books. [more...]

Book Oven, particularly my colleague Stephanie, has been deeply involved in the working group of the BookServer project, helping organize the crafting of standards to make this all happen. In the long run, it will make it easier and cheaper to distribute books throughout the universe, and capture the conversations around them.

Looking forward to the official public launch tonight.

We’ve always had abridged versions and “selected-essays-from” and audio versions and made-for-TV adaptations. But in a more open rights schema (say, Creative Commons licensing), there is something thrilling about the idea that dedicated readers – the most engaged of all stakeholders, beyond the original writer & editor – might legitimately improve texts for certain audiences. (This is exactly what happened with LibriVox – passionate readers transforming texts they love so that others can enjoy them).

I know I have read texts where I thought: the information in that book was great; pity it was so dry, or so poorly-written. As books go digital, the ability to work on them and adapt them for different needs becomes a simple matter of opening up a text editor, importing a file (in theory) and getting to work. In the academic market, and certain sectors of serious non-fiction, something like this could be extremely valuable to readers, and to writers as well (increased markets).

For such creative engagement to happen, it will require writers and publishers to look differently on their works than they might have done to date – to view their “finished” books as something more open-ended, and available. The tools are here already; what remains to be seen is whether our culture of authorship has room for such a radical change in perspective.

We’re seeing hints that in some quarters, we may be ready. Cory Doctorow has legions of fans who translate his works and make audio versions of his books. But for some reason this struck me as a bigger jump. Kevin Kelly reports as follows:

The other day I got a note from a Dutch guy who is a fan of my book OUT OF CONTROL. He found my ideas great but my presentation “frustrating.” But unlike my other “frustrated” readers, Andreas Lloyd decided to do something about it: he remixed my book!

I think the result is quite amazing. Remixing is perhaps too strong a word because he mostly simply dropped entire chapters, with a little re-arranging here and there. It is a very sharp but intelligent edit. But the effect is striking. [more...]

Writes Andreas Lloyd about his work on Kelly’s book:

Kevin Kelly’s book Out of Control is a fascinating book full of fascinating ideas reaching across the board from artificial intelligence, evolution, biology, ecology, robotics and more to explore complexity, cybernetics and self-organising systems in an accessible and engaging way.

But in reading Out of Control, I found it suffering from a number of frustrating flaws: Not only is it way too long-winded, it is also almost completely void of meta-text to help the reader understand what Kelly is trying to do with his book (having read the book, I’m still wondering)…

I would have preferred a much shorter book, more narrowly focused on the idea of self-organising systems. The whole text of the original book is easily available online at Kelly’s own website, so I thought: Why not remix the online text to make such a book? [more...]

Why not, indeed?

You can get a copy of Kelly’s original book here (free on the web, or to purchase from Amazon).

And a copy of Lloyd’s remixed version here (free on the web, free pdf).

I should add, this is one of the things at the back of our minds as we build Book Oven. We hope that good digital publishing platforms mean that writers and readers will start to get the sense that a book might live on, and grow after the writer or publisher press “publish” … that engagement, annotations, commentary, and generally the life around a book might become as culturally important in our eyes as the original itself.

Beyond Publishing: When Every Book is Connected to Everyone

We have an all-star line-up who have agreed to join us (if SXSW agrees to give us some space to talk):

• Kassia Krozser co-founder of Quartet Press
• Peter Brantley, Director of the Internet Archive
• Andrew Savikas, VP of Digital Initiatives at O’Reilly Media
• and me, co-founder of Book Oven and LibriVox

The description of the panel is as follows:

What happens when every book is online, linkable, and connected to every writer and every reader? What happens when the book is liberated from being words on paper, unbound from a format that’s two thousand years old? What happens to how we read and how we write?

For more info, or to comment on or vote for the panel (please do!), see here.

I don’t like the term “self-publishing.”

Cloud-Publishing

In the emerging world of “cloud-publishing,” it’s meaningless, and does not reflect what’s coming, what we’re already seeing signs of. Cloud-publishing — what we’re doing at Book Oven — is providing a toolset, on the web, to publish books; a publishing model native to the web, with all the benefits:

* instantaneous global distribution
* simple, web-based collaboration (editing, proofreading, design)
* networks of creators and collaborators (new and existing)
* networks of readers (new and existing)

How book creation gets organized in such a model will vary greatly, from the lonely writer, to a small press wishing to focus on content & not technology, to collections of colleagues and friends, to professional associations, collections of strangers aligned by topical interest, or financial interest, or just aligned in the interest of making books.

The key here is: cloud-publishing (and Book Oven) will provide the tools to allow groups of people to easily coalesce around the production, distribution and sale of a particular book or books. How those groups organize themselves will look different from book to book. But Book Oven’s tools will mean that book makers can focus on the important thing, the content, and not worry about the technical hurdles of making, printing & distributing books.

What’s Wrong with the Status Quo?

Others of course, will prefer the current model, and that is wonderful and excellent and good. I love publishers, and books, and book stores, and libraries, and they have brought me great joy over the years.

But the web offers new, parallel ways to make books, not necessarily better, but more flexible, more easily global, more connected.

That’s the larger movement afoot. And if all goes well, Book Oven will be a big part of this movement.

Self-Publishing Doesn’t Cut It

So “self-publishing” doesn’t cut it as a description of what we’re building at Book Oven. It’s too limiting, and doesn’t get anywhere near the vision we have of a new, parallel, model for publishing as a whole.

As the availability of web-based tools for making books grows, the distinction will be between what you might call “corporate publishing” — blockbuster, and top-end publishing; commercial textbook production, etc. — and the rest of us. The rest of us are “independent”: the smaller presses, groupings of people who put craft and time into making something with various motivations, and yes, individual writers. That doesn’t mean there won’t be money on the independent side, but the structures around the businesses will be very different than on the blockbuster side.

We’re All Indie Now, or None of Us Is

Though as Richard Nash suggests, we’re all indie now (except the big guys), so even the term indie doesn’t mean much:

So now the phase of indie is over, now that the monopoly on the production and distribution of knowledge, culture and opinion has been broken, what next, a new phase, a drive to, perhaps, create, maintain, defend a New Authenticity arises?—Ah, am I opening myself up for derision with that…? Never mind, I toss it up there, a wounded duck. Power will try to hide behind the people, let’s use a new authenticity to stop them. [more...]

Bloggers Suck, Right? And Amateur Talkers?

But back to “self-publishing”: once upon a time, it conjured in some people’s minds a negative slew of adjectives: Bad. Sub-par. Not selected.

Deserved or not, that’s how many react to the term.

They said the same thing about blogging in the old days, and yet I can (and do) now find 10 times as much wonderful, thoughtful, well-written content from blogs than I do from professional outlets. Every time I hear people claim that blogging is “bad” (amazingly, you still hear that), I roll my eyes. As I said to Henry Baum: you might as well complain about bad “talkers.” Some talkers are wonderful. Others insufferable. Some of the worst “talkers” are paid lots of money to talk; some of the best are friends of mine and they do it for free. So you would never consider complaining about “talking” as a method of communicating, just because lots of people talk nonsense. You assume that is the case, and seek out the good talkers. So on the web with bloggers, and music, and indeed, books.

Talking is just a means of transmission of words and ideas.

But for whatever reason, it’s hard for people to think of distributing text in the same way that they think of distributing verbal words. While talking might be free, distributing text, audio, video has only recently become (effectively) free. And just as the world is getting used to blogging, and maybe podcasting, along comes this idea that books can be distributed essentially for free. Think about what happened with blogging: suddenly, the means of transmission of text – to a global audience – became free. When the cost restrictions on producing written text disappeared, so did the power of the established system to decide what was worth printing and what wasn’t. And people did what they are wont to do when systems blocking them disappear: they started publishing text like crazy on the web. That made people very uncomfortable. It meant lots of “bad” writers were publishing their text for global consumption. But more importantly, it meant that we saw a beautiful flourishing of great writing that no one had bothered printing before – the topic was too narrow, the audience too dispersed, the return on investment too low. It turns out that the calculations about what’s “worth” publishing is very different when the cost of publishing approaches zero. And that means that now, if you have an internet connection, you can read just about anything produced anywhere in the world. Lutes and Violins? Bespoke tailoring? Goats? You got it.

In the end though, blogging is just a means of transmission of words. And it turns out that there were millions of people willing to write excellent stuff that for whatever reason the traditional media set up did not, or could not publish.

We expect to see something similar with cloud-publishing.

[We've had easy access to the tools of publishing for a while, see for instance Lulu. But the most important shift we're about to see, I think, is the network of readers and writers and book makers. I'll write more about this later].

Good Books vs. Bad Books

Now, I can guarantee something. As the ability to publish books gets easier, we’ll have more “bad” books than you can shake a stick at. (In fact, we probably already do, published, unpublished, self-published…).

But the lines of distinction will not be, as they were previously, between traditional publishing and self-publishing, but rather just between good books and bad books (with caveats about eyes of beholders etc).

We’ll have corporate publishers making good books, and independents making more good books. And everyone will make lots of bad books too. But how independents organize themselves will change greatly too.

Publishers and the Web

Fact 1: many corporate publishers are having a hard time coming to terms with the web. It’s going to get harder for them – they already are having trouble sustaining their cost structures, and have off-loaded much of the work around the web to their authors.

Fact 2: The web has a wonderful ability to allow people to sort through huge piles of information, and seek, rank and share gems.

Opinion 1: People will find more new writing on the web; so “book publishers” must start to be native to the web, and see the web as integral to their task of connecting readers and writers; they cannot continue to see the web as some kind of add-on to their marketing departments.

Opinion 2: Big corporate publishers will have trouble with Opinion 1; so new publishing models need to emerge.

Nothing Is New Under the Sun

We’ve seen this in music and blogs/newspapers and encyclopedia, where the web, and cheap tools of production have spawned an explosion of creative activity, excellence, choice, and a toiling mass of music and writing of all shapes and sizes (along with lots of dreck, but that’s a side effect of all the great stuff).

We think the same is going to happen for books. With a global audience hungry for content, and cheap easy tools for creation and distribution, and a growing network of creators and readers connected on the web and an explosion of devices that allow people to be reading at times and in places they never did before, the distinctions about where or how books were made will fall away.

Do I Want to Read It?

All that will matter are these two questions:
1. is it any good?
and
2. do I want to read it?

And so “self-publishing” is a term that should be retired.

Before the Internet, when a writer could not find a publisher to print and sell a manuscript, he could take matters into his own hands, head to the print shop, and hawk the book himself.
Rejected auteurs today have it easier, with a handful of websites that let them write, edit and print books bound like the pros.

Call it Self-publishing 2.0. And it’s one of the fastest-growing sectors of the book world, which is itself enjoying a nice growth period despite the recession and the glut of competing media choices.
“Like in any other media, when you the make tools of publishing easy, people will take advantage of it,” said Hugh McGuire, founder of Montreal self-publishing start-up Book Oven. “It’s just now coming into public consciousness.”

McGuire is one of the leaders of the movement toward digital empowerment in books. When it officially launches (it’s in beta testing now), Book Oven will let people collaborate in the writing, editing and proofreading of a book, all through online tools. When it’s ready, book lovers will be able to buy a copy on the website, either in electronic or paper format. [more...]

Tomorrow I’ll be posting a long-winded manifesto about the term “self-publishing.”

Self-Publishing Review: So how’s the site work? What do people do once they create a project and how can writers contribute to other writers’ projects?

Hugh McGuire: Firstly, we’ve just launched and we have lots of work to do yet. In fact, one of the reasons we decided to open things up before we were finished is that we want to build something that writers, editors, proofreaders, designers and readers will love using. We are trying to create a new kind of model for publishing, and in order to do that we need to have the active input of the people who share our vision of something new.

After that intro, what you can do now:

1. Proofread texts that are in the system using Bite-Size Edits (it’s fun, if you can believe it)
2. Upload your own text, and: a) proofread it yourself using Bite-Size; b) get a private group of people you select to proofread it using Bite-Size Edits c) open it to the world to be proofread
3. Accept/reject/modify all Bite-Size Edits, so you retain control of your book.
4. Invite reviewers/editors/colleagues to an online reviewing/annotation/editing tool, built especially for long-form texts, which helps you collect editorial feedback in one place; and gives an easy way to implement that feedback.
5. Publish your book as ebook/epub, or html
6. Eventually you’ll be able to do some other things:
7. sell your finished book as an ebook, or as a print-on-demand book (in the Book Oven store, and in partner retailers)
8. find editors/proofreaders/designers/collaborators to help work on your book

SPR: What’s in it for readers?

HM: In the coming years, I expect we’ll see readers and writers getting much closer together. And one of the ideas behind Book Oven has always been to introduce new ways that they might interact. For instance, what if, prior to publication, you invited your potential readers to help you proofread your text using Bite-Size Edits? Or, what if you opened your novel to a select group to comment on, annotate, before you published? What if you held a cover design contest for your next book of non-fiction? What if you took one of your existing books, and opened it up for annotation – and subsequently published a second edition, with the annotations?

These are all possible now, and these are the kinds of things we would like to see happen.

But really the answer, for readers, is that Book Oven, we hope, will help spawn a new movement of grassroots, indie writing and publishing. We’ll make it easier for people who wish to publish to do so, but we’ll be giving the tools to allow the collaboration that will make those published books better.

So, what do readers get? More ways to connect with books and writers and writing; more books; more quality in indie publishing; we hope: a vibrant new of grassroots of writing.

I guess in some sense I look at the coming digital revolution in books as similar to the indie revolution that came to music with digital and the web. As a music listener, I now have access to a more wonderful and varied assortment of music than ever before in history, because music is no longer constrained by the physical/economic limitations that existed in the era of radio & record labels. We still have radio and labels, of course, but now we also have a vibrant, thriving music culture enable by the cheap production tools and the infinite global distribution enabled by the web.

The results haven’t been great for labels. For music fans, it’s been wonderful.

I expect we’ll see the same with books, and we’d like Book Oven to be a driving force behind that change.

SPR: What I first notice on the site is that the writing is good. In the Bite-Size Edits section you’ve got Ford Maddox Ford and Tolstoy – which is incredibly fun to edit. A couple of writers that have uploaded stuff are MCM and Barbara Jean Walsh – both good writers. The old problem with self-publishing is the quality of the writing. How do you exert quality control at the Book Oven – or do you see this as anti-free expression. But supposing in a worst case scenario you’ve got a lot of people uploading poorly thought-out work and users have to sift through all of that. What will Book Oven do to exert a little quality control?

HM: Book Oven is built for anyone who wants to use it, and we won’t put restrictions on what writing goes in & what doesn’t. For non-writers, however, the quality control will come from helping readers/editors etc find the kind of text they want to find. The internet is very good at allowing people to sort through mountains of information; helping people sift will be important for us.

But I’d like to address the underlying question about quality.

It is my belief that the act of creation is the most satisfying and valuable act a person can perform. Whether that is building a bookcase, or building a company, or writing a song, or writing a novel, I don’t think there is anything more valuable to a person. An act of creation — the vision it requires, the dedication, the discipline, the belief, the stubbornness, the time, and the passion — is more meaningful to a person than just about anything else I can think of.

Now, the next question that’s asked is: well, is it any good? Will anyone like what you’ve created? That’s an important question, and certainly it’s more deeply satisfying to create something that people like than it is to create something that people don’t like.

Whether other people will like what you’ve created is an important question, but it is far less important than the question: have you created something?

With LibriVox (the volunteer, public domain audiobook project I started in 2005), I had this insight at some point: That what we were really doing was providing a platform to allow people who wished to create audiobooks of texts they love, to create them and give them away for free to the universe. That the world gets a huge library of free public domain audiobooks is a wonderful and important fringe benefit. But the main thing we do is enable people to create things they are passionate about.

And it turns out that LibriVox volunteers make some extraordinary recordings; it turns out that millions of people love many of the recordings we make; it turns out that some of the recordings are less good; and that some people find it offensive when they fall upon LibriVox recordings that they don’t like. And it turns out there is a simple solution for that last problem: listen to something else.

We never ask whether people who don’t talk as well as Obama should be able to talk; it never occurs to us to tell our kids that if they can’t hit like Babe Ruth, that they should not play baseball; we would never tell our mothers (or fathers) that they can’t cook as well as Gordon Ramsay, so they should stop trying.

Instead we say: try to do the things you love, try to do them as well as you can.

Whether other people will like what you do is a whole other matter, but if you are driven to do something you love, you should work hard to do it.

And if that is publishing a book, so much the better for you and the universe.

If it’s publishing a great book, even better again.

SPR: The stigma about self-publishing is definitely fading. What’s your feeling on self-publishing in general? Do you think it’s totally legitimate, worthy of some of the scorn, the future? All of the above?

HM: To me the only thing that is relevant is the text. Is it good? Do I like it? Would I read it? If it is a great book, I couldn’t care less what particular publishing model was used to get it to me.

Does more people writing books mean that there will be more bad books? You bet. But that’s a good thing; it means more people are writing books. And more people writing books — especially if they are writing from passion — means we’re likely to have more extraordinary books.

And as above, the question is: how do I as a reader sift through the mountains of books to find the extraordinary texts that I want to read? And the answer will come from the web.

There are hundreds of millions of blogs on the web. Many of them are terrible and I would never want to read them. (I could say the same of the vast majority of traditionally-published books).

However blogging means that I now have access to so much wonderful writing, about topics that are of particular interest to me. The economic/physical constraints of pre-internet writing meant that I had a smallish choice of content that was deemed commercially viable by companies who distributed content near me; the web means that I have an unlimited choice of content, some of it deemed commercially viable; much of it just interesting to the writer; and lots of it interesting to me. And the key thing about blogging was that it got going because bloggers were reading each others’ work. There was a distributed network of writers connected by the link and by shared interests in the things they were writing about and reading about. The link-connections between bloggers is what allowed people to find more interesting stuff, and encouraged more people to read and write and blog.

So, turning to self-publishing, (specifically talking about fiction) I think what has to happen is a more connected network of independent writers and small presses, who are actually working on/ reading each others work. And if that happens successfully, the stigma that’s now attached to self-publishing doesn’t matter anymore.

Especially if the text is good.

SPR: I think I know the answer, but what’s so refreshing about your site is that you talk about print on demand and don’t offer a caveat. Of course print on demand is amazing: anyone can make a book. But still there are detractors. I guess I’m asking for you to explore the caveat and any pitfalls there might be to starting a service like this.

HM: Yes, I still read the odd article about how dumb “bloggers” are, how bad their grammar is, how they are all opinionated jerks etc etc. You might as well complain about how dumb “talkers” are. I heard someone talking on the bus, and he was an idiot, ergo talkers are idiots.

It turns out that some of the best writing in the world about whatever topic you care to mention is happening on blogs, written by “bloggers.”

What is blogging? Loosely, a mechanism to get written text from a writer to a reader. The quality of that written text has *nothing* to do with the mechanism of transmission. And bloggers are just people who write text and publish it on the web.

What is print-on-demand? Same as above. Just a mechanism.

SPR: How about a few words about LibriVox, for those who don’t know about it.

HM: LibriVox.org is a volunteer-driven project to make public domain audiobooks and give them away to the universe. It’s a totally decentralized project that runs completely on the web. Our objective is:

To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.

SPR: What sorts of books have been read aloud, and how many?

As of today, our catalog contains 2,547 works, in 26 languages. Our range of books is constrained only by copyright law and the curious passions of our volunteer readers. We’ve got Austen, Nietzsche, Twain, Sun Tzu, Einstein, Descartes, Thucydides, Sayers, Phaedrus, Machiavelli, Barrie, Goethe, Cervantes, Dante, Dickens, Voltaire, Belloc, Wells, Dumas, Joyce, Trollope, and on and on and on.

SPR: Is this a place for self-publishers to store readings of their own texts? So if I release something free to read on Scribd, can I read the audio book on LibriVox?

HM: No. Our requirements for inclusion in the LibriVox catalog are:

1. text must be in the public domain (ie. out of copyright) in the USA
2. text must be published (or in certain cases, “notable”)

We send self-publishers to our great friends at http://podiobooks.com.

SPR: How does the success of LibriVox fit into your vision for Book Oven?

HM: The key insight I had from watching LibriVox evolve is this: with the right kind of space and tools on the web, people will organize themselves to do the most extraordinary (and complex) things together. I also learned that many people, given the chance to *help* in the creation process, are very happy to do so, if they believe in what is being created. And by providing a vision about what we were trying to do at LibriVox, and the tools/platform, some wonderful things happened.
So this is what we would like to do with Book Oven:

• articulate a vision for a new model of publishing books, that is totally native to the web
• provide a platform for people to organize how they wish around the creation of books
• enable a grassroots community of bookmakers and booklovers to come together with the purpose of: making & distributing/selling & reading books

SPR: The difference with an audio book and the written word is significant – it’s just not as obvious if the writing isn’t up to par, and sometimes doesn’t even matter. It’s just a different process listening to or reading a book. I just keep coming back to the concept of “bad” writing that could end up on the site and how to deal with that.

HM: It’s easy: don’t read it, and instead read some of the great stuff.

SPR: There’s just a lot of writing where even intensive collaboration isn’t going to make it a readable novel.

HM: I totally agree. In fact, I’d bet that intensive collaboration might make some novels worse.
Book Oven is not about forcing everyone to open up their manuscripts to mass collaboration.
What we are trying to do is build an online space where groups of people can work on a book and easily publish it.

This is how traditional books are published: groups of people work together on them (writer, editor, proofreader, designer, cover designer, printer, distributor, retailer, marketer, publicity).
What we are doing is putting a basic toolset on the web, that allows much of that to happen easily.

SPR: Is it the case that those books will likely not find collaborators and better books will find more interest? I suspect that’s the case. If so, how is that sort of collaboration system going to work?

HM: We see two kinds of streams of activity:

• open collaborations where people are helping each other make books out of interest, kindred spirit etc.
• a simple marketplace exchange where writers/editors/proofreaders/designers can find each other & get work done.

SPR: So this is going to be a marketplace?

HM: Yes, though we want to be careful to make sure that the marketplace does not drown out the more spontaneous — and less commercial — collaborations. That is a challenge we are very much aware of, and we’ll work hard to make sure that Book Oven is not *just* classifieds for bookish people. And we’d love some help thinking about that, if any of your readers are interested in helping us work through it.

SPR: When designers come to collaborate on projects, for example, are they going to be advertising their services?

HM: I think we’ll have to have some kind of reputation system, so we’re taking suggestions on how to work that out! Early days yet.

SPR: How is money going to change hands, or is it more a place for designers or editors to pad their resumes. What do participants get besides the satisfaction of collaborating?

Again, I think it’s a bit early to make any final statements. I imagine there might be three models: collaborate out of interest/shared sense of purpose, collaborate for a fee, or collaborate for a % of sales.

But again, this part of things is complex and we want to make sure we develop the marketplace with lots of input from an engaged community.

SPR: The site says you’ll be adding more features in the coming months. What’s to come?

Well, just imagine everything you would want from a cloud-based publishing platform. What would the ideal look like from your perspective? We’d like to build that.

And that’s not meant to be facetious – it’s just that much of our decision-making will be driven by the needs & desires of our community, so we don’t want to make any promises about features until we’re certain it’s something people want.

SPR: Thanks a lot, Hugh. Best of luck with the site. Keep us informed.
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On July 9, Ian Shapira, Staff Writer for the Washington Post wrote a 1,500 word fluff piece about consultant Anne Loehr, who explains GenY to their cohabitants in the workplace. Then Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan blogged the story, reprinting some of Anne Loehr quotations from the Post piece.

Ian Shapira was initially happy: apparently even in mainstream media, getting a nod from one of the big blogs is now a coup to be celebrated (how times have changed).

The Outrage

But, his editor wasn’t so happy. He responded: “They stole your story. Where’s your outrage, man?” Where indeed?

So Shapira changed his tune, and now he is outraged (sort of). He spent about two days investigating and writing that 1,500 word story, only to get ripped off by some blogger.

Writes Shapira:

With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post.

When You Are Drowning, How Much Is a Glass of Water Worth?

A more pertinent question might be:

I wonder what most readers would think if they knew how much time & money the Washington Post decided to spend on this story?

All this points to some big problems in the news business – and the problem isn’t bloggers “stealing” stories. The problem is measuring the value of content. (See the cost breakdown & analysis of the controversy at the Neiman Lab).

Pre-web, written content was relatively scarce, and people wanted to read fluff. So newspapers paid writers to write lots of fluff, which filled a demand for a valuable commodity. The fluff was used that to sell newspapers & ads, and subsidize hard news.

But in the world of the web, we are swimming in a sea of written content. Much of it fluff. The overwhelming majority of it produced without a cent getting exchanged – by bloggers. Some of it is produced by professional blog outfits like Gawker, who produce it much cheaper than a newspaper does.

So, when other people are providing for free some of the kinds of content you used to sell, then you can’t keep selling it. And the “free” is on both ends: free for readers, and free from producers.

Put another way, can you imagine a Gawker blogger spending a *DAY* writing that post?

A quick investigation shows that the Gawker writer of the article, Hamilton Nolan, writes about 10 articles a day, I expect without an editor spending any time on his copy.

So: how can Washington Post compete against Gawker’s 10x content output advantage, and probably 40x cost advantage? Answer: they can’t, if they compete in creating the same kinds of content. Question: do you think the Washington Post piece was worth 10 times more to you as a reader than the Gawker piece was? Was it worth 40 times more to you as a reader?

Wikipedia vs. Britannica

See, for instance, Britannica’s original response to Wikipedia. Wikipedia offered basic general information, easily, for free, usually with links out to more substantial info. Whether or not Wikipedia is “as good as” Britannica matters not a whit to its millions of readers: it is “good enough” for them, meaning that the sale value of “just providing basic general information” got a lot closer to zero, all of a sudden. I’m not sure how Britannica is doing these days, but if it is to survive, it has to innovate in ways that deliver more value than “just providing basic general information.” And its in that added value where the new business opportunities lie (and I don’t claim to know the answers for Britannica).

In the same way, newspapers have to come to terms with an info marketplace where the value of fluff is approaching zero, while unique, good reporting has a value greater than zero.

Building a Media Business Around Value

So, again, my question is: why would newspapers pay a staff writer to spend a full day investigating & writing a 1,500 word fluff piece when there are a million fluff pieces all over the web getting published every day? What value are they adding to the info marketplace, and is that value worth the money/time they’ve spent on it?

One answer might be: why not strike a deal with some of the better fluff-piece content providers on the web (say, BoingBoing, Gawker, etc etc), and just republish those pieces (perhaps with a copyedit for style etc). In that way, newspapers could still provide the horizontal content that keeps people reading the serious stuff & ads; but could probably cut the costs of the junk they publish in half, or more.

They already licence lots of content from wire services, maybe its time to start licensing content from bloggers too.

And then they could focus on their strengths:

• aggregating eyeballs
• selecting a good mix of stories

and most importantly:

• investigating & writing about stories that other people won’t or can’t write about