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E-book Links for October 7th through 10th

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UPDATE: See Alan de Smet’s comment on the “Will technology kill book publishing?” piece: “. Traditional publishers will find themselves increasingly marginalized. To the extent that publishers continue to dominate, they will do so as highly streamlined companies that serve authors, not bookstores or even readers.”

Blogging, empowerment, and the “adjacent possible”

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Learning to make things changes how we understand and consume those things.

When I started reporting the news as a teenager, I read the newspaper differently. When I learned to play guitar in my ’20s, I listened to songs differently. When I first played around with desktop video editing 15 years ago I began watching movies and TV differently.

It’s the same with writing: Learning how to write changes how we read — and how we think. This is from Maryanne Wolf’s excellent Proust and the Squid:

As the twentieth-century psychologist Lev Vygotsky said, the act of putting spoken words and unspoken thoughts into written words releases and, in the process, changes the thoughts themselves… In his brief life Vygotsky observed that the very process of writing one’s thoughts leads individuals to refine those thoughts and to discover new ways of thinking. In this sense the process of writing can actually reenact within a single person the dialectic that Socrates described to Phaedrus. In other words, the writer’s efforts to capture the ideas with ever more precise written words contain within them an inner dialogue, which each of us who has struggled to articulate our thoughts knows from the experience of watching our ideas change shape through the sheer effort of writing. Socrates could never have experienced this dialogic capacity of written language, because writing was still too young. Had he lived only one generation later, he might have held a more generous view.

What Vygotsky and Wolf observed about writing, we can extend and expand to writing in public. Writing for an audience is a special and important sub-case: it’s writing with feedback and consequences. Doing it yourself changes how you think about it and how you evaluate others’ efforts. The now-unfashionable word “empowerment” describes a part of that change: writing is a way of discovering one’s voice and feeling its strength. But writing in public involves discovering the boundaries and limits of that power, too. We learn all the different ways in which we are not the center of the universe. That kind of discovery has a way of helping us grow up fast.

So when I hear the still-commonplace dismissal of blogging as a trivial pastime or an amateurish hobby, I think, hold on a second. Writing — making texts — changes how we read and think. Every blogger (at least every blogger that wasn’t already a writer) is someone who has learned to read the world differently.

I’m preparing for some public talks later this month about Say Everything, which is why I’m revisiting this ground. It seems to me that, in our current bedazzlement with the transformative powers of social networking, we routinely underestimate the practical social importance of change at this individual level.

Clay Shirky, for instance, has focused, with great verve and insight, on how the Web enables us to form groups quickly and easily, and how that in turn is reshaping society. In his book Cognitive Surplus, Shirky identifies a spectrum of values stretching from personal to communal to public to civic. The spectrum, he writes, “describes the degree of value created for participants versus nonparticipants. With personal sharing, most or all of the value goes to the participants, while at the other end of the spectrum, attempts at civic sharing are specifically designed to generate real change in the society the participants are embedded in.”

This is a useful framework for discussion. What I think it neglects is the way the act of personal sharing changes individuals in ways that make the other sorts of sharing more imaginable to them. In other words, the spectrum is also a natural progression. The person who has struggled to turn a thought into a blog post, and then seen how that post has been reflected back by readers and other bloggers, is someone who can think more creatively about how sharing might work at other scales and in other contexts. A mind that has changed is more likely to imagine a world that can change.

In his great new book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson describes the concept of “the adjacent possible.” This passage is from a recent excerpt in the Wall Street Journal, in which Johnson considers the improbable yet imaginable “primordial innovation of life itself”:

The scientist Stuart Kauffman has a suggestive name for the set of all those first-order combinations: “the adjacent possible.” The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation. In the case of prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup. Sunflowers and mosquitoes and brains exist outside that circle of possibility. The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace.

One way to assess the impact of blogging is to say that the number of people who have had the experience of writing in public has skyrocketed over the course of the last decade. Let’s say that, pre-Internet, the universe of people with experience writing in public — journalists, authors, scholars — was, perhaps, 100,000 people. And let’s say that, of the hundreds of millions of blogs reported to date, maybe 10 million of them are sustained enough efforts for us to say that their authors have gained real experience writing in public. I’m pulling these numbers out of a hat, trying to err on the conservative side. We still get an expansion of a hundredfold.

Each of these people now has an entirely new set of “adjacent possibilities” to explore. What they make of those opportunities will shape the next couple of decades in important, and still unpredictable, ways.

E-book Links, October 5-6

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As I mentioned, I’m beginning to explore the e-book universe. One thing I’m going to do is post links here as I find them. Hope that’s useful. I’ll be posting soon with a compilation of all the suggestions I received for sources and authorities in this field. Thanks for those!

  • Aggregating Deep Discount Readers of eBooks [Eric Hellman]: How libraries and individuals could pool resources to acquire rights to e-books: " If a hundred thousand people offered a dollar to Clay Shirky (and Penguin, his publisher) for Cognitive Surplus to be released as a creative commons licensed ebook, certainly at some point they would examine their prospects for future sales and figure out how to say yes."

Some software use notes

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A miscellany today: Amazon’s Kindle for the Web, WordPress’s new Offsite Redirects feature, and a little complaint about iTunes.

  • Kindle for the Web
    Kindle for the Web lets you embed a chunk of a book onto a Web page. I thought it would be a fun thing to experiment with here and played with it a bit this morning but it turns out to look lousy in narrow column — it really needs a full-page width, which is hard on any page with a sidebar (i.e., gazillions of Web pages). So either I’m doing it wrong or it needs some tweaking.
  • WordPress Offsite Redirects
    One of the toughest choices you make as you step out onto the Web is where to put your writing. Lots of choices today, sure, from self-hosted to free or paid hosted services. But what happens if you need to move? People still need to find you, your stuff is embedded in the Web with tons of links, you’ve got some rank in Google… you don’t want to throw any of that away.

    This is called lock-in, and it’s how too many Web and software businesses hold onto customers — not, in other words, by real loyalty, but by inertia and inconvenience.

    So super kudos to the WordPress.com team for offering a new feature that lets you move away from WordPress.com and point your incoming traffic forward to your new home. It’s not a free service (don’t know how much it costs). But the most common scenario is for someone who started a free blog at WordPress.com who’s now planning to operate it as more of a business and needs the freedom and versatility of hosting their own site. That kind of user isn’t going to mind paying a small fee, whatever it is, to hold onto the links and traffic she’s already accumulated.

    As WordPress’s Matt Mullenweg said on his blog, quoting Dave Winer: “The easier you make it for people to go, the more likely they are to stay.” Indeed!

  • Irksome iTunes
    iTunes is now an almost-decade-old tool, one that supports an ever-wider array of Apple products, and that groans beneath the weight. What I don’t understand is why, in all this time, they haven’t fixed what I find to be the single most annoying problem with the interface, one that still trips me up nearly every day. It’s with how the search box works.

    Here’s the scenario:

    1. I type a search in the box at the upper right of the window — say, “Mountain Goats.”
    2. I realize I’m not finding what I’m after because the left-hand column selecter is not on my “music library” but on some playlist.
    3. I click “music library” at the top of the left column.
    4. The search term disappears from the box and so I HAVE TO TYPE IT AGAIN.

    This is a recurring irritation. Surely it’s possible to keep the search term loaded and apply it to the new choice in the left-hand column? I mean, I don’t know, maybe it’s not a really simple problem, maybe it’s even a big hairy problem. But Apple has now had how many years to fix it?

    Maybe there is some logical basis for viewing this as a feature and not a bug. If so, I certainly can’t see it!

Hey Zuck! Hollywood just hacked your profile

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You know those Facebook phishing hacks — the ones where someone gets control of your account and sends phony messages to your friends? “I’m stuck in London! Send money quick!”

I kept thinking of that phenomenon as I watched The Social Network this weekend. Because what filmmakers Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher have done to their protagonist, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is the moral equivalent of this sort of identity theft.

They have appropriated Zuckerberg’s life story and, under the banner of fidelity to “storytelling” rather than simple documentary accuracy, twisted it into something mirroring their own obsessions rather than the truth. They transform Mark Zuckerberg’s biography from the messy tale of a dorm-room startup’s phenomenal success into a dark vision of a lonely geek’s descent into treachery.

The Social Network takes the labyrinthine and unique origins of Facebook at Harvard and turns them into a routine finger-wagger about how the road to the top is paved with bodies. Sorkin apparently isn’t interested in what makes his programmer-entrepreneur antihero tick, so he drops in cliches about class resentment and nerd estrangement.

In order to make it big, Sorkin’s Zuckerberg has to betray his business-partner friend (Eduardo Saverin). Why is he hungry for success? Sorkin has him wounded by two primal rejections — one by a girlfriend, the other by Harvard’s fraternity-ish old-money “final clubs.” The programming whiz-kid doesn’t know how to navigate the real-world “social network” — get it? — so he plots his revenge.

Many thoughtful pieces have already discussed the movie, and I don’t want to rehash them. I agree more with my friend David Edelstein’s take on the film’s cold triviality than with the enthusiastic raves from other quarters. Go read Lawrence Lessig and Jeff Jarvis for definitive critiques of the film’s failure to take even the most cursory measure of the real-world phenomenon it’s ostensibly about. Here’s Lessig: “This is like a film about the atomic bomb which never even introduces the idea that an explosion produced through atomic fission is importantly different from an explosion produced by dynamite.” Over in Slate, Zuckerberg’s classmate Nathan Heller outlines how far off the mark Sorkin wanders in his portrait of the Harvard social milieu. (Obsessive, brainy Jewish kids had stopped caring about whether they were excluded from the almost comically uncool final clubs at Harvard long before my own time there, and that was quite a long time ago by now.)

It’s Hollywood that remains clubby and status-conscious, far more dependent on a closed social network to get its work done than any Web company today. The movie diagrams the familiar and routine dynamic of a startup business, where founders’ stakes get diluted as money pours in to grow the company, as some sort of moral crime. (That may explain why — as David Carr lays it out — startup-friendly youngsters watch the film and don’t see the problem with Zuckerberg’s behavior, while their elders tut-tut.) Again, this is a Hollywood native’s critique of Silicon Valley; movie finance works in a more static way.

It’s strange to say this, since I am not a fan of Facebook itself — I prefer a more open Web ecology — but The Social Network made me feel sorry for the real Zuckerberg, notwithstanding the billionaire thing. He’s still a young guy with most of his life ahead of him, yet a version of his own life story that has plainly been shaped by the recollections of people who sued him is now being imprinted on the public imagination.

At least Orson Welles had the courtesy to rename William Randolph Hearst as “Charles Foster Kane.” This isn’t a legal issue (John Schwartz details why in today’s Times). But, for a movie that sets itself up as a graduate course in business ethics, it is most certainly a giant lapse of fairness.

In New York, Mark Harris described the film as “a well-aimed spitball thrown at new media by old media,” but I think it’s more than that — it’s a big lunging swat of the old-media dinosaur tail. The Web, of which Facebook is the latest popular manifestation, has begun to move us from a world in which you must rely on reporters and screenwriters and broadcasters to tell your story to one where you get to present your story yourself. (And everybody else gets to tell their own stories, and yours too, but on a reasonably equal footing.) The Social Network says to Zuckerberg, and by proxy, the rest of us who are exploring the new-media landscape: “Foolish little Net people, you only think you’re in control. We will define you forever — and you will have no say!”

In other words, The Social Network embodies the workings of the waning old order it is so thoroughly invested in. It can’t be bothered with aiming to tell the truth about Zuckerberg — yet it uses his real name and goes out of its way to affect documentary trappings, down to the concluding “where are they now?” text crawl.

The movie’s demolition job on the reputation of a living human being is far more ruthless than any prank Zuckerberg ever plotted from his dorm room. For what purpose? When a moviemaker says he owes his allegiance to “storytelling,” usually what he means is, he’s trying to sell the most tickets. I guess that to get where they wanted to go, Sorkin and Fincher just had to step on a few necks themselves.

Mutating books, evolving authors

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The Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy and sobering piece this week about how the rise of the e-book is altering the landscape of the publishing industry. It was not, on the surface, a happy picture for authors:

The digital revolution that is disrupting the economic model of the book industry is having an outsize impact on the careers of literary writers. Priced much lower than hardcovers, many e-books generate less income for publishers. And big retailers are buying fewer titles. As a result, the publishers who nurtured generations of America’s top literary-fiction writers are approving fewer book deals and signing fewer new writers. Most of those getting published are receiving smaller advances.

The Journal piece focused on fiction writers, but the implications are similar for nonfiction authors like me. Whenever a wave of change sweeps through an industry, the old ways of making money tend to dissipate faster than the new ways coalesce. There is much wringing of hands. People panic. As a veteran of the newspaper industry I feel like I know this movie pretty well by now.

I also know this: when you do creative work, you are not owed a living. Few things are more ludicrous than a writer with a sense of entitlement. It would be wonderful if the pie available to reward authors were growing rather than shrinking. But we live in an era blessed with an abundance of opportunities to publish — and a relative scarcity of time to consume the products of publishing. Gluts make prices collapse. There’s no way an e-book can or should cost anything like what a paper book costs. Maybe volume will make up some of the difference — but, plainly, not yet.

I don’t see the point in hand-wringing. But I still plan to write long-form non-fiction and hope to earn at least some portion of my living doing it. So I’m going to do my damnedest to try to understand the changing publishing environment and figure out the smartest way for an author to navigate it. Id rather adapt and evolve than gripe my way to extinction.

To that end, I’m beginning a self-education program in the world of electronic book publishing. I know by some measures I’m coming to this absurdly late. Then again, I was worried when I started this blog in 2002 that I was late to that party, too.

So help me out. What are your favorite sources of information about e-books and e-readers? Do you just read about them as part of your wider intake of tech and gadget news? Or are there dedicated sites, publications and bloggers who you rely on?

I’m aware of the venerable Teleread. I’ve been enjoying Tim Carmody’s thoughtful posts at Wired and the Atlantic. I’ll read all the think pieces about “the future of the book” by writers like Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly that come along. Any other useful sources out there I should know about?

I’ll collect my findings and report back!

Technorati’s survey: head-scratchers and brand-y swill

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I don’t think I’ve ever taken Technorati’s annual blogger survey before, but the company’s annual reports have usually been a useful source of information, so when I got an email inviting me to respond I took a few minutes to do so.

I began to think something was off when I saw this question:

WordPress’s hosted service at WordPress.com, which has gazillions of users, is free. I host my own blog using the WordPress.org open-source version. I do pay an ISP for server space, so maybe that’s considered “a paid third-party hosting service,” but boy is this confusing! Meanwhile, it’s 2010 — how many people handcode their own HTML? Isn’t it, like, statistically insignificant?

On to the next head-scratcher:

Um, my Twitter account is linked to my blog. Like a horde of other bloggers I use a widget to display my tweets on my blog. But like so many other bloggers I don’t feed my posts automatically into Twitter, because Twitter works better when you actually speak as a person. So there’s no accurate way to answer this question.

Then there was this:

The question’s wording presupposes that the respondent is blogging anonymously, which is just plain weird, since most bloggers identify themselves.

This question began to suggest where Technorati’s head was at.

It turned out that the survey was heavily focused on the role of “brands” in blogging, which is usually a signal that somebody somewhere has dollar signs in their eyes.

“Has a brand ever approached you…?” How exactly would a brand do that? Have brands grown mouths and legs?

I’m usually courteous but I guess I snapped.

An experiment with Storify

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Storify is a new service for building on-the-fly curated “stories” out of disparate elements like Tweets, Flickr photos, Facebook postings and so on. It’s in beta now; I gave it a whirl just now. I’m embedding my first Storify story here.

I couldn’t figure out how to add my own text other than the summary at the top; it would have been nice to weave the quoted tweets together with my own words.

I also couldn’t figure out how to use Storify to edit the story after I saved it.

I assume these are on the “features” list somewhere!

UPDATE: As you can see I have now figured out how to do both these things. Memo to interface designers: some of us actually find text labels more useful than naked icons… Still, can’t complain too loudly here. Storify is pretty easy to use!

Independent commercial Web publishing: still exhausting?

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You’ve probably heard by now that Mike Arrington has sold TechCrunch to AOL. Congratulations to him and to AOL, which has bought itself some talented people, some good traffic and no doubt some headaches down the road.

This paragraph in Arrington’s explanatory post jumped out at me:

The truth is I was tired. But I wasn’t tired of writing, or speaking at events. I was tired of our endless tech problems, our inability to find enough talented engineers who wanted to work, ultimately, on blog and CrunchBase software. And when we did find those engineers, as we so often did, how to keep them happy. Unlike most startups in Silicon Valley, the center of attention at TechCrunch is squarely on the writers. It’s certainly not an engineering driven company.

This description jumped out at me because it was so familiar — and also because it surprised me. I guess I hoped and trusted that the “endless tech problems” that were at the heart of my experience at Web 1.0-era Salon.com (they led me to write a book) were a thing of the past. What Arrington is saying is that the stuff that was hard 10-15 years ago is still hard today. I guess I should have expected that.

At Salon, we had some highly gifted people working for us at different times on the technology side, we built a robust CMS that’s still operating (and that spawned its own open source version), we built our very own pay wall in about a month in 2001, and we pioneered all sorts of useful things in our day. But it was exhausting for an organization that was driven by its editors and writers to also have to figure out how Web publishing worked, technologically and economically; to build systems that would scale well and bend to our needs; and to work out how sales and marketing could make sense in the new medium.

By the second half of the decade I spent at Salon I know I spent far more of my hours dealing with those issues than writing or editing copy. I remember thinking enviously of the position our sometime rivals at Slate occupied; they’d always had the benefit of being tied to a larger enterprise — first Microsoft, then the Washington Post. No doubt that had its own frustrations. But it meant they could concentrate on the fun stuff without having to invent and manage the entire business and technology operation simultaneously.

This is why I always stop and think when I hear friends and colleagues repeat the truism that “the journalism is the hardest part.” We said that a lot at Salon, and I still hear it today, but I no longer think it’s true. Good journalism is always work, sure — but it’s known work. We know what it takes to do it right.

The challenges of independent publishing online, on the other hand, are the real “hard part” of this industry. I bet any entrepreneurial publisher you ask will agree — go talk to Rafat Ali or Om Malik or Pete Rojas or anyone else who has tried to build their own Web-based publishing enterprise over the past decade.

The thing is, if you’re the sort of entrepreneur that I’m guessing Arrington is, the hard stuff may be exhausting, but it’s also what gets you up in the morning. That’s one reason startup founders so often spin their wheels after they’re acquired; designing and building your own little speedboat is just a lot more absorbing than managing how to integrate your personal craft with a battleship-scale corporation. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out for the TechCrunch crew.

Slate: Don’t close that corrections window — open it all the way!

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Craig Silverman had a fascinating column last week about changes that Slate has made in its corrections policy in the wake of an embarrassing dustup with Politico. Here’s Craig’s pithy summary of this bizarre Escher-esque episode (which I also wrote about at the time):

In July, Slate published an article that provided evidence that Politico was routinely scrubbing errors out of its stories without adding a correction or similar notice for readers. Slate’s story, of course, was noticed by many journalists and many of us, myself included, weighed in with criticism and reaction. Then the tables began to turn: Politico pointed out several mistakes in Slate’s reporting and, in the end, Slate admitted that its correction policy had a provision that allowed for it to scrub factual errors from stories without the addition of a correction. (Provided that the error was spotted within twenty-four hours of publication, and it was spotted by someone at Slate.) Pot, meet kettle.

Slate is not the only publication with a post-publication window for tinkering with stories. At MediaBugs, we keep encountering this issue — as with this bug filed about a New York Times story earlier this summer. If you read that discussion, you’ll see a Times editor admitting the paper made substantive changes (though not technically the correction of an outright error) to an article after it was posted on the Web. Does the Times have a window, like Slate’s, in which it considers it okay to alter published articles online? How about headlines? Both Slate and the Times have always been extra meticulous in thinking through their approach to corrections, yet this post-publication change policy is a problematic area for both.

As a result of the Slate-Politico fracas, Slate has now decided to close its 24-hour window. This seems to be the upright, ethical response. It’s plainly well-intentioned and carefully thought out. But I think it’s the wrong direction to go: it’s a step backwards. It continues the tradition of allowing the limitations of print-think to govern our online behavior. The Web lets us improve our stories after we publish them. Why should we tie our hands?

We do so, of course, out of a sense of accountability. We don’t want to seem to be pulling fast ones on our readers. We don’t want it to appear that we’re “scrubbing” the record, as Silverman puts it.

There is a simple solution to this problem: Throw open the windows — and keep them open! Let yourself make changes; just don’t hide them. The same technology that lets us keep tinkering with words we’ve published also lets us store and display every alteration we make.

Instead of agonizing over the duration of the period in which we allow ourselves to change an already-published story, we should just be transparent about all the post-publication changes we make. Let’s give readers the “history” of our articles the way Wikipedia shows all the changes to each of its pages. As James Bridle puts it: Everything should have a history button!

This achieves two useful goals at once: It frees your hand to keep improving your articles even after you’ve published them, which is one of the great advantages Web publishing offers over print; and it makes sure that your readers will never think you’re hiding anything from them. Most readers will never need or want to see the revisions you’ve made; they just want to read the current version of the story. But in the rare case that someone raises a question or a dispute about a change, the record will be public.

If and when there are major substantive errors that you need to correct, you can still go the whole distance and add a traditional correction notice to any page. But if you’re fixing small errors or little details that don’t warrant that, you wouldn’t have to bother.

The technical hurdles to such an approach are minimal; most modern content management systems store all the revisions to each story in a database anyway. There’s a small amount of design work in figuring out how to expose the revisions to your readers. But it’s not a hard problem. I’m already showing all my revisions here on this blog — just look at the bottom of the full-page version of this, or any, post. (And if you run WordPress, you can install the WordPress Post Revision Display plugin too if you like!)

I’m firmly convinced that over the next few years this practice will become as commonplace in online publishing as “print this page” buttons and comments. So my challenge to Slate, the Times, and every other online publisher is: why not become a leader in this realm? Stop closing your “windows.” Instead, open them up and show your changes.