Category Archives: books

what is a book?

What is a book? This is a question we will want to answer if we want to enable books to reflect the electronic age and not the ink-on-paper era, just as Gutenberg and his heirs fully exploited that once-new technology back when, well, the ink was still fresh.
I don’t think a precise definition is possible, certainly not one that will clearly and unambiguously delimit books, journals, magazines, newspapers, and any other print media, and also add electronicity without claiming blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, mail-lists, and website forums.[1] Each of these are distinct entities, yet might share every salient feature with most of the others at its margins.
I will instead go after What is our notion of a book? What is it I expect you to mean when you use that word instead of, say, “magazine” or “website”? [2]

* * *

So let us begin with this: “A book is something you read.” And by that we will not mean something we watch or view. [3]
While in a sense we have passed the buck to another philosophical discussion — What constitutes reading? — this allows us to now regard children’s books as entries into reading, and not annotated drawings. Moreover we have escaped making some arbitrary rules about the proportion of words to drawing or whether the artwork “illustrates” the text and such like.
Now saying a book is something you read means I regard a book of photographs as a book only in how I approach it psychologically based on its physical presentation. Remove the binding literally and figuratively and the book is no more — a slideshow of Ansel Adams photographs is no more a book [4] than it is a newspaper. The essence of book has expired along with the physical book.
And this starts us down a different path to answering our question of “What is a book?” If I can’t define a book the way I might define a hammer or an element in the periodic table or a songbird, I can at least identify characteristics or expectations that we all generally associate with a book. What results is less a definition in the dictionary sense than it is a diagnosis — any object meeting a majority of these symptoms will fall under our designation of “book,” even though other objects share some traits and not every trait is met by every instance.

* * *

So. What do we know about a book? Let us look at the general knowledge about books, the type that we use daily to distinguish books from other text media, as well as separating it from other media generally and from other artforms.

A book presumes a commitment of time and involvement from the reader. No one expects to pore over a magazine for a month, to give twelve or fifteen or twenty hours involvement to Newsweek or Architectural Digest, but a worthy book can claim that time or more. In the implied contract between the reader and author, this is something we readers pay and based on which the author can set her sights much higher (or deeper) than with the alternatives.
A book permits the reader to set his own pace. I don’t mean “you read slowly and I’m a fast reader” but that when reader and author fully engage we readers can slow down and reflect on what’s been said. We can savor the language, we can re-read the page, even copy the most expressive sentences in our commonplace books, all the while tussling with the words on the page, their meaning, their color, their elegance or abruptness or unexpected appearance, which operate in conjunction with but also separately from the meaning, from the ideas or events they convey.
“Reading maketh a full man … and writing an exact man,” Bacon said, and while the philosophers have mined the territory between what we intend when we put things into words and what we each understand those words to mean, the gap in communication is not complete. In reading and in writing we do find understanding in these glyphs on a page, and it comes entirely from our brains. And we might note how books cannot engage our several senses, except peripherally as we grasp a hefty book or screw up our nose at the cheap glue in a paperback’s binding. The vast capability of our visual acuity [5] is set aside and become a mere doorman to the intellect, which assumes the operative role in our reading, particularly what Bill Hill calls “ludic reading.” [6]
And we cannot hurry or slow down our understanding, but only delight in its delights and accompany its anguished plodding through tortuous texts. And so when I say a book lets us set our own pace — as a movie, symphony, dance or play cannot — I mean the pace at which our intellect maunders or gambols through the material set before it.
And every other part of us is diminished, as an audience sits quietly in the dark before a brightly lit actor on stage. Now is not the moment we notice the hard bottom of our chair or the light fading at day’s end or hunger or the voices of others conversing or calling to us; these are subordinate as our minds engage in work or recreation.
When people wonder whether a “book” might not in our future be so multidimensional, with sound, video, interactivity, and mutability to our desires, I say “yes, but.” Yes, these can be and should be and will be incorporated. But if “book” no longer means the intellect is permitted to come to the foreground in this way, if text and how it requires this is diminished to insignificance, then we will have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and what we have then will perhaps be entertaining and educational and absorbing, but it will not be a book, whatever label attaches to it.

* * *

A book has an author’s voice, what Wayne Booth calls the implied author [7], with whom we converse or in whose academy we study or at whose feet we sit to hear the tales of the unfamiliar and entertaining. But we have an almost palpable relation with that author that is not so very different than we have with our friends.
This isn’t so easy with a movie, say, or a play, a TV show. We are more likely to engage on that level with the actors portraying the characters. In the message, the mood, the impression we take away, can we say confidently where the author leaves off and the director begins? We have an interaction but it is at a remove, it is less personal.
Will the same author’s voice be distinct in networked and collaborative books? Or will it be drowned out? Perhaps what we know of installation and performance art will guide us here — as art moved off the walls and away from the close and tangible, the artist did not disappear, did not transmogrify into an actor or impresario. The essence of art survived and with it the artist.

Like that famous dictum about obscenity from Potter Stewart, when he wrote that he might not be able to provide a test for it, “but I know it when I see it,” we must be guided by our intuition. Some aspects can change radically if the essence of the book is still recognizable. When we ask, What is a book? we know any answer will be slippery but our certainty is unwavering. In our test, it requires only that we remember the greater part of any book resides not in the physical, but in the invisible world. Then whether we have one author or a collaboration, unchanging text or mutable, physical pages or electronic, static images or dynamic, audio, video, connection to the web or not, whatever the manifestation the future brings us, there should be no confusion. Then as now, each of us will know a book when we see it.

[1] In part my conclusion of indefinability is based on similar effort undertaken years ago, when I was in graduate school. One professor set the students in his seminar to define what a poem was. As we attributed features to “a poem,” it was not hard to find counter examples — I remember a Thomas Wolfe sample brought in to counter the notion that rhythm distinguished poetry from prose. Language, purpose, length, rhythm, meter, rhyme, fixed patterns, brevity of expression — every feature could be countered with a prose sample that met the criteria and poems (which we all agreed were poems) that did not. Although we each had a notion of what constitutes a poem, we couldn’t create a definition that encompassed the essence of those notions.
What we settled on was the most rudimentary of differentiation, and yet unassailable — a poem is a text in which the author has decided where one line ends and the next begins.
[2] For instance, FTrain, a site written by Paul Ford in multiple voices, using multiple personae/bylines, mixing pieces that are not always obviously differentiable as being fiction, biography or memoir, as well as essay and reporting, and not incidentally relying on original musical compositions for full comprehension of the site.
[3] The audio book by this taxonomy is the platypus of content. Yes, it is a book. And yet we say mammals do not have bills and birds do, despite the contrary example of the platypus. Of course, the matter of illustrations, footnotes, maps, charts and such that we often utilize in a book do not fit so well in the audio book, so it is indeed an odd duck.
[4] It may come as a surprise that the contrary question of “Is a slideshow of The Castle a book?” is not that readily answered. It may well be. Assuming we are not seeing it formatted in Powerpoint bullets, the distinction between the pages of one of today’s e-books and a “slide” in that slideshow seems minuscule, one of projection onto a wall instead of display on a handheld device or computer. But the cohesiveness a binding provides those Ansel Adams photographs is more than matched in a novel by the linearity of the text, the consecutiveness of the sentences, the structure of a story being told. Without a binding, the photographs stand on their own, independent despite their sequence. Not so the text, where each page connects to its predecessor and successor. If we are to rule that a slideshow is not a book — not even a group-read book — it will have to be because it fails the criteria discussed later on.
[5] I repeat a famous observation noting how immediately in a crowded room we find someone’s eyes resting on us, and how small the actual visual information is, a fraction of a fraction of one percent of all that is visible to our eyes. Yet we scarcely recognize that we are the most visual of creatures.
[6 ] In his report that launched the Microsoft Reader, published as “The Magic of Reading.” [link to .lit version. To .doc version.]
[7] In his classic book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, another book I encountered first in graduate school.

updike’s tattoo

I was startled but not surprised to read about John Updike’s denigration of the future of ebooks at BookExpo. Had he tattooed it on his forehead he couldn’t have made clearer his idealization of 19th-century structures and modes of thinking. His talk represented the final glorification of the author/artist/creator as a higher being ingrained with heroic capabilities unapproachable by mere mortals. For Updike and all those unable to cross into the new Canaan of electronicity, the apotheosis of the artist fits into the tradition of history as a history of heroes. There are but a few gods of literature as is only natural, I expected him to say, and if you have art made by whole masses of people, many of them unidentifiable, we’ll have regressed to the period of Notre Dame cathedral or the Pyramids, in which no individuals were glorified for their contributions to art or to the era when writing went unsigned or when the writer assumed the mantle of some greater person, to glorify them and spread their thinking.*
This hero worship that Updike has wallowed in for the last 40 years has addled his brain. Reading some of his remarks reminded me of a screed published in the Saturday Review of Literature back in the 1970’s, if memory serves, by Louis Untermeyer, decrying the abominably inadequate generation of poets who couldn’t use rhyme or rhythm to make their way out of a paperbag. The rant was entertaining and almost credible in its denunciations — except for Untermeyer’s having chosen one of the great poems of the 20th century — Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” — as his example of the witless drivel this shiftless new generation was producing. Untermeyer and Updike belong to the same class of critic as the French academicians who dismissed the Impressionists or the Fauves (“wild beasts”), blind to the future and in love with their own tinny emulation of the greater artists who preceded them. (Who will put Updike in the same list as Tolstoy or Faulkner or Fielding or Isak Dinesen? They made new forms, indelibly, while the best that can be said of Updike is that he stood alone as a prolific writer of magazine pieces.)
It’s been said** that new scientific theories don’t win over their opponents so much as they are accepted by the new generation and the old generation dies off. The same holds true in art, of course. The precocious writers of the coming generation will cut their teeth on blogs and networked books and media that will require visual acuity and improvisational methods that make Updike’s juvenilia*** feel as antiquated as William Dean Howells or James Fenimore Cooper. A living fossil. What a fall from the pantheon he occupies in his imagination.

* I’m thinking specifically of the authors of Revelations and several of the Gnostic gospels.
** Apparently most authoritatively in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Updike’s remarks provide striking evidence of Kuhn’s theory of incommensurability of paradigms — if you are fully caught up in the old paradigm you have no way of assessing the new, lacking common values, language and experience with its proponents.
*** Updike has published, what, 36 books of fiction? We’ll be generous and include the first quarter in this categorization.

physical books and networks

The Times yesterday ran a pretty decent article, “Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry’s Rules”, discussing some recent experiments in book publishing online. One we’ve discussed here previously, Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, which is available as both a hefty 500-page brick from Yale University Press and in free PDF chapter downloads. There’s also a corresponding readers’ wiki for collective annotation and discussion of the text online. It was an adventurous move for an academic press, though they could have done a better job of integrating the text with the discussion (it would have been fantastic to do something like GAM3R 7H30RY with Benkler’s book).
Also discussed is the new Mark Danielewski novel. His first book, House of Leaves, was published by Pantheon in 2000 after circulating informally on the web among a growing cult readership. His sophmore effort, due out in September, has also racked up some pre-publication mileage, but in a more controlled experiment. According to the Times, the book “will include hundreds of margin notes listing moments in history suggested online by fans of his work who have added hundreds of annotations, some of which are to be published in the physical book’s margins.” Annotations were submitted through an online forum on Danielewski’s web site, a forum that does not include a version of the text (though apparently 60 “digital galleys” were distributed to an inner circle of devoted readers).
The Times piece ends with an interesting quote from Danielewski, who, despite his roots in networked samizdat, is still ultimately focused on the book as a carefully crafted physical reading experience:

Mr. Danielewski said that the physical book would persist as long as authors figure out ways to stretch the format in new ways. “Only Revolutions,” he pointed out, tracks the experiences of two intersecting characters, whose narratives begin at different ends of the book, requiring readers to turn it upside down every eight pages to get both of their stories. “As excited as I am by technology, I’m ultimately creating a book that can’t exist online,” he said. “The experience of starting at either end of the book and feeling the space close between the characters until you’re exactly at the halfway point is not something you could experience online. I think that’s the bar that the Internet is driving towards: how to further emphasize what is different and exceptional about books.”

Fragmented as our reading habits (and lives) have become, there’s a persistent impulse, especially in fiction, toward the linear. Danielewski is probably right that the new networked modes of reading and writing might serve to buttress rather than unravel the old ways. Playing with the straight line (twisting it, braiding it, chopping it) is the writer’s art, and a front-to-end vessel like the book is a compelling restraint in which to work. This made me think of Anna Karenina, which is practically two novels braided together, the central characters, Anna and Levin, meeting just once, and then only glancingly.
I prefer to think of the networked book not as a replacement for print but as a parallel. What’s particularly interesting is how the two can inform one another, how a physical book can end up being changed and charged by its journey through a networked process. This certainly will be the case for the two books in progress the Institute is currently hosting, Mitch Stephens’ history of atheism and Ken Wark’s critical theory of video games. Though the books will eventually be “cooked” by a print publisher — Carroll & Graf, in Mitch’s case, and a university press (possibly Harvard or MIT), in Ken’s — they will almost certainly end up different for their having been networkshopped. Situating the book’s formative phase in the network can further boost the voltage between the covers.
An analogy. The more we learn about the evolution of biological life, the more we understand that the origin of species seldom follows a linear path. There’s a good deal of hybridization, random mutation, and general mixing. A paper recently published in Nature hypothesizes that the genetic link between humans and chimpanzees is at least a million years more recent than had previously been thought based on fossil evidence. The implication is that, for millennia, proto-chimps and proto-humans were interbreeding in a torrid cross-species affair.
Eventually, species become distinct (or extinct), but for long stretches it’s a story of hybridity. And so with media. Things are not necessarily replaced, but rather changed. Photography unleashed Impressionism from the paint brush; television, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s new book argues, acted as a foil for the postmodern American novel. The blog and the news aggregator may not kill the newspaper, but they will undoubtedly change it. And so the book. You see that glint in the chimp’s eye? A period of interbreeding has commenced.

GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 is live!

The Institute has published its first networked book, GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 by McKenzie Wark! This is a fascinating look at video games as allegories of the world we live in, and (we think) a compelling approach to publishing in the network environment. As with Mitch Stephens’ ongoing experiment at Without Gods, we’re interested here in a process-oriented approach to writing, opening the book up to discussion and debate while it’s still being written.
Inside the book, you’ll find comment streams adjacent to each individual paragraph, inviting readers to respond to the text on a fine-grained level. Doing the comments this way (next to, not below, the parent posts) came out of a desire to break out of the usual top-down hierarchy of blog-based discussion — something we’ve talked about periodically here. There’s also a free-fire forum where people can start their own threads about the games dealt with in the book or about the experience of game play in general. It’s also a place to tackle meta-questions about networked books and to evaluate the successes and failings of our experiment. The gateway to the forum is a graphical topic pool in which conversations float along axes of time and quantity, giving a sense of the shape of the discussion.
Both sections of GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 — the book and the forum — are designed to challenge current design conventions and to generate thoughtful exchange on the meaning of games. McKenzie will actively participate in these discussions and draw upon them in subsequent drafts of his book. The current version is published under a Creative Commons license.
And like the book, the site is a work in progress. We fully intend to make modifications and add new features as we go. Here’s to putting theory into practice!
(You can read archived posts documenting the various design stages of GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 here.)

good discussion(s) of kevin kelly article

In the New York Times own book discussion forum, one rirutsky opines eloquently on the problems with Kelly’s punch-drunk corporate optimism:

…what I find particularly problematic is the way that Kelly’s “analysis”–as well as most of the discussion of it–omits any serious mention of what is actually at stake in the utopian scheme of a universal library (which Borges, by the way, does not promote, but debunks). It has little to do with enabling creativity, but rather, with enabling greater corporate profits. Kelly is actually most close to the mark when [he] characterizes the conflict over digital books as a conflict between two business models. Of course, one gets the impression from some of Kelly’s writings that for him business and creativity are more or less the same thing….
….A more serious consideration of these issues would move away from the “old” binary antagonisms that Kelly outlines (surely, these are a relic of a pre-digital age) and think seriously about how society at large is changed by digital technologies and techniques. Who has the right to copy or to make use of data and who does not? In a world of such vast informational clutter, doesn’t power accrue to those who can afford to advertise? It is worth remembering, too, that searching is not, after all, a value-free operation. Who ultimately will control the searching and indexing of digital information? Should the government–or private corporations–be allowed to data mine the searches that people make? In short, who benefits and who loses from these technological changes? Where, precisely, is power consolidated?
Kelly does not even begin to deal with these sorts of serious social issues.

And from a typically immense Slashdot thread (from highlights conveniently collected by Branko Collin at Teleread) — this comes back to the “book is reading you” question:

Will all these books and articles require we login to view them first? I think having every book, article, movie, song, etc available for use anytime is a great idea and important for society but I don’t want to have to login and leave a paper trail of everything I’m looking at.

And we have our own little thread going here.

on ebay: collaborative fiction, one page at a time

Phil McArthur is not a writer. But while recovering from a recent fight with cancer, he began to dream about producing a novel. Sci-fi or horror most likely — the kind of stuff he enjoys to read. But what if he could write it socially? That is, with other people? What if he could send the book spinning like a top and just watch it go?
Say he pens the first page of what will eventually become a 250-page thriller and then passes the baton to a stranger. That person goes on to write the second page, then passes it on again to a third author. And a fourth. A fifth. And so on. One page per day, all the way to 250. By that point it’s 2007 and they can publish the whole thing on Lulu.

The fruit of these musings is (or will be… or is steadily becoming) “Novel Twists”, a ongoing collaborative fiction experiment where you, I or anyone can contribute a page. The only stipulations are that entries are between 250 and 450 words, are kept reasonably clean, and that you refrain from killing the protagonist, Andy Amaratha — at least at this early stage, when only 17 pages have been completed. Writers also get a little 100-word notepad beneath their page to provide a biographical sketch and author’s notes. Once they’ve published their slice, the subsequent page is auctioned on Ebay. Before too long, a final bid is accepted and the next appointed author has 24 hours to complete his or her page.
Networked vanity publishing, you might say. And it is. But McArthur clearly isn’t in it for the money: bids are made by the penny, and all proceeds go to a cancer charity. The Ebay part is intended more to boost the project’s visibility (an article in yesterday’s Guardian also helps), and “to allow everyone a fair chance at the next page.” The main point is to have fun, and to test the hunch that relay-race writing might yield good fiction. In the end, McArthur seems not to care whether it does or not, he just wants to see if the thing actually can get written.
Surrealists explored this territory in the 1920s with the “exquisite corpse,” a game in which images and texts are assembled collaboratively, with knowledge of previous entries deliberately obscured. This made its way into all sorts of games we played when we were young and books that we read (I remember that book of three-panel figures where heads, midriffs and legs could be endlessly recombined to form hilarious, fantastical creatures). The internet lends itself particularly well to this kind of playful medley.

if:book in library journal (and kevin kelly in n.y. times)

The Institute is on the cover of Library Journal this week! A big article called “The Social Life of Books,” which gives a good overview of the intersecting ideas and concerns that we mull over here daily. It all started, actually, with that little series of posts I wrote a few months back, “the book is reading you” (parts 3, 2 and 1), which pondered the darker implications of Google Book Search and commercial online publishing. The article is mostly an interview with me, but it covers ideas and subjects that we’ve been working through as a collective for the past year and a half. Wikipedia, Google, copyright, social software, networked books — most of our hobby horses are in there.
I also think the article serves as a nice complement (and in some ways counterpoint) to Kevin Kelly’s big article on books and search engines in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine. Kelly does an excellent job outlining the thorny intellectual property issues raised by Google Book Search and the internet in general. In particular, he gives a very lucid explanation of the copyright “orphan” issue, of which most readers of the Times are probably unaware. At least 75% of the books in contention in Google’s scanning effort are works that have been pretty much left for dead by the publishing industry: works (often out of print) whose copyright status is unclear, and for whom the rights holder is unknown, dead or otherwise prohibitively difficult to contact. Once publishers’ and authors’ groups sensed there might finally be a way to monetize these works, they mobilized a legal offensive.
Kelly argues convincingly that not only does Google have the right to make a transformative use of these works (scanning them into a searchable database), but that there is a moral imperative to do so, since these works will otherwise be left forever in the shadows. That the Times published such a progressive statement on copyright (and called it a manifesto no less) is to be applauded. That said, there are other things I felt were wanting in the article. First, at no point does Kelly question whether private companies such as Google ought to become the arbiter of all the world’s information. He seems pretty satisfied with this projected outcome.
And though the article serves as a great introduction to how search engines will revolutionize books, it doesn’t really delve into how books themselves — their form, their authorship, their content — might evolve. Interlinked, unbundled, tagged, woven into social networks — he goes into all that. But Kelly still conceives of something pretty much like a normal book (a linear construction, in relatively fixed form, made of pages) that, like Dylan at Newport in 1965, has gone electric. Our article in Library Journal goes further into the new networked life of books, intimating a profound re-jiggering of the relationship between authors and readers, and pointing to new networked modes of reading and writing in which a book is continually re-worked, re-combined and re-negotiated over time. Admittedly, these ideas have been developed further on if:book since I wrote the article a month and a half ago (when a blogger writes an article for a print magazine, there’s bound to be some temporal dissonance). There’s still a very active thread on the “defining the networked book” post which opens up many of the big questions, and I think serves well as a pre-published sequel to the LJ interview. We’d love to hear people’s thoughts on both the Kelly and the LJ pieces. Seems to make sense to discuss them in the same thread.

a network of books

This is the “cover” (it’s an email mag) of the latest issue of artkrush. Part of a 2004 installation by Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi called “The Connections.”

Connections is the outcome of a reflection which began in the early Nineties, at the time of the war in the Gulf…. At that time, the operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, preceding the last operation which could be named “Desert, full stop”, established the era of a media oriented war, therefore a war of image, on the very spot of the Revelation, that of the three sacred books, a historic place dedicated to communication. They clearly showed the lack of means of communication and even the lack of communication power of the Arab countries as well as the resurgent fear of technology.
In our calendar, that of Hegira, we are today in 1420, eternally nomads. Our roots are clearly set in the future, as the Arab poet Adonis wrote it. For me, it is an attempt to enter this desert, this collective memory, to remove sand from objects which may lose their identity through the changing of material but will still keep their memory.

A recent comment from Adam Greenfield, author of the just-published “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing,” seems apropos:

I’ve become all but unable to think of the objects around me except in terms of Actor-Network theory, as sort of depositions or instantiations of a great deal of matter, energy and information moving through the world. And of course, a book is nothing but a snapshot in that regard; you have to do a lot of extra work if you want to prise out and examine the flows it is a part of, or even those it has set up.

defining the networked book: a few thoughts and a list

The networked book, as an idea and as a term, has gained currency of late. A few weeks ago, Farrar Straus and Giroux launched Pulse , an adventurous marketing experiment in which they are syndicating the complete text of a new nonfiction title in blog, RSS and email. Their web developers called it, quite independently it seems, a networked book. Next week (drum roll), the institute will launch McKenzie Wark’s “GAM3R 7H30RY,” an online version of a book in progress designed to generate a critical networked discussion about video games. And, of course, the July release of Sophie is fast approaching, so soon we’ll all be making networked books.

The institue will launch McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY Version 1.1 on Monday, May 15

The discussion following Pulse highlighted some interesting issues and made us think hard about precisely what it is we mean by “networked book.” Last spring, Kim White (who was the first to posit the idea of networked books) wrote a paper for the Computers and Writing Online conference that developed the idea a little further, based on our experience with the Gates Memory Project, where we tried to create a collaborative networked document of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates using popular social software tools like Flickr and del.icio.us. Kim later adapted parts of this paper as a first stab at a Wikipedia article. This was a good start.
We thought it might be useful, however, in light of recent discussion and upcoming ventures, to try to focus the definition a little bit more — to create some useful boundaries for thinking this through while holding on to some of the ambiguity. After a quick back-and-forth, we came up with the following capsule definition: “a networked book is an open book designed to be written, edited and read in a networked environment.”
Ok. Hardly Samuel Johnson, I know, but it at least begins to lay down some basic criteria. Open. Designed for the network. Still vague, but moving in a good direction. Yet already I feel like adding to the list of verbs “annotated” — taking notes inside a text is something we take for granted in print but is still quite rare in electronic documents. A networked book should allow for some kind of reader feedback within its structure. I would also add “compiled,” or “assembled,” to account for books composed of various remote parts — either freestanding assets on distant databases, or sections of text and media “transcluded” from other documents. And what about readers having conversations inside the book, or across books? Is that covered by “read in a networked environment”? — the book in a peer-to-peer ecology? Also, I’d want to add that a networked book is not a static object but something that evolves over time. Not an intersection of atoms, but an intersection of intentions. All right, so this is a little complicated.
It’s also possible that defining the networked book as a new species within the genus “book” sows the seeds of its own eventual obsolescence, bound, as we may well be, toward a post-book future. But that strikes me as too deterministic. As Dan rightly observed in his recent post on learning to read Wikipedia, the history of media (or anything for that matter) is rarely a direct line of succession — of this replacing that, and so on. As with the evolution of biological life, things tend to mutate and split into parallel trajectories. The book as the principal mode of discourse and cultural ideal of intellectual achievement may indeed be headed for gradual decline, but we believe the network has the potential to keep it in play far longer than the techno-determinists might think.
But enough with the theory and on to the practice. To further this discussion, I’ve compiled a quick-and-dirty list of projects currently out in the wild that seem to be reasonable candidates for networked bookdom. The list is intentionally small and ridden with gaps, the point being not to create a comprehensive catalogue, but to get a conversation going and collect other examples (submitted by you) of networked books, real or imaginary.

* * * * *

Everyone here at the institute agrees that Wikipedia is a networked book par excellence. A vast, interwoven compendium of popular knowledge, never fixed, always changing, recording within its bounds each and every stage of its growth and all the discussions of its collaborative producers. Linked outward to the web in millions of directions and highly visible on all the popular search indexes, Wikipedia is a city-like book, or a vast network of shanties. If you consider all its various iterations in 229 different languages it resembles more a pan-global tradition, or something approaching a real-life Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And it is only five years in the making.
But already we begin to run into problems. Though we are all comfortable with the idea of Wikipedia as a networked book, there is significant discord when it comes to Flickr, MySpace, Live Journal, YouTube and practically every other social software, media-sharing community. Why? Is it simply a bias in favor of the textual? Or because Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia — is more closely identified with an existing genre of book? Is it because Wikipedia seems to have an over-arching vision (free, anyone can edit it, neutral point of view etc.) and something approaching a coherent editorial sensibility (albeit an aggregate one), whereas the other sites just mentioned are simply repositories, ultimately shapeless and filled with come what may? This raises yet more questions. Does a networked book require an editor? A vision? A direction? Coherence? And what about the blogosphere? Or the world wide web itself? Tim O’Reilly recently called the www one enormous ebook, with Google and Yahoo as the infinitely mutable tables of contents.
Ok. So already we’ve opened a pretty big can of worms (Wikipedia tends to have that effect). But before delving further (and hopefully we can really get this going in the comments), I’ll briefly list just a few more experiments.
>>> Code v.2 by Larry Lessig
From the site:

“Lawrence Lessig first published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 1999. After five years in print and five years of changes in law, technology, and the context in which they reside, Code needs an update. But rather than do this alone, Professor Lessig is using this wiki to open the editing process to all, to draw upon the creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online, collaborative book update; a first of its kind.
“Once the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will take the contents of this wiki and ready it for publication.”

Recently discussed here, there is the new book by Yochai Benkler, another intellectual property heavyweight:
>>> The Wealth of Networks
Yale University Press has set up a wiki for readers to write collective summaries and commentaries on the book. PDFs of each chapter are available for free. The verdict? A networked book, but not a well executed one. By keeping the wiki and the text separate, the publisher has placed unnecessary obstacles in the reader’s path and diminished the book’s chances of success as an organic online entity.
>>> Our very own GAM3R 7H30RY
On Monday, the institute will launch its most ambitious networked book experiment to date, putting an entire draft of McKenzie Wark’s new book online in a compelling interface designed to gather reader feedback. The book will be matched by a series of free-fire discussion zones, and readers will have the option of syndicating the book over a period of nine weeks.
>>> The afore-mentioned Pulse by Robert Frenay.
Again, definitely a networked book, but frustratingly so. In print, the book is nearly 600 pages long, yet they’ve chosen to serialize it a couple pages at a time. It will take readers until November to make their way through the book in this fashion — clearly not at all the way Frenay crafted it to be read. Plus, some dubious linking made not by the author but by a hired “linkologist” only serves to underscore the superficiality of the effort. A bold experiment in viral marketing, but judging by the near absence of reader activity on the site, not a very contagious one. The lesson I would draw is that a networked book ought to be networked for its own sake, not to bolster a print commodity (though these ends are not necessarily incompatible).
>>> The Quicksilver Wiki (formerly the Metaweb)
A community site devoted to collectively annotating and supplementing Neal Stephenson’s novel “Quicksilver.” Currently at work on over 1,000 articles. The actual novel does not appear to be available on-site.
>>> Finnegans Wiki
A complete version of James Joyce’s demanding masterpiece, the entire text placed in a wiki for reader annotation.
>>> There’s a host of other literary portals, many dating back to the early days of the web: Decameron Web, the William Blake Archive, the Walt Whitman Archive, the Rossetti Archive, and countless others (fill in this list and tell us what you think).
Lastly, here’s a list of book blogs — not blogs about books in general, but blogs devoted to the writing and/or discussion of a particular book, by that book’s author. These may not be networked books in themselves, but they merit study as a new mode of writing within the network. The interesting thing is that these sites are designed to gather material, generate discussion, and build a community of readers around an eventual book. But in so doing, they gently undermine the conventional notion of the book as a crystallized object and begin to reinvent it as an ongoing process: an evolving artifact at the center of a conversation.
Here are some I’ve come across (please supplement). Interestingly, three of these are by current or former editors of Wired. At this point, they tend to be about techie subjects:
>>> An exception is Without Gods: Toward a History of Disbelief by Mitchell Stephens (another institute project).

“The blog I am writing here, with the connivance of The Institute for the Future of the Book, is an experiment. Our thought is that my book on the history of atheism (eventually to be published by Carroll and Graf) will benefit from an online discussion as the book is being written. Our hope is that the conversation will be joined: ideas challenged, facts corrected, queries answered; that lively and intelligent discussion will ensue. And we have an additional thought: that the web might realize some smidgen of benefit through the airing of this process.”

>>> Searchblog
John Battelle’s daily thoughts on the business and technology of web search, originally set up as a research tool for his now-published book on Google, The Search.
>>> The Long Tail
Similar concept, “a public diary on the way to a book” chronicling “the shift from mass markets to millions of niches.” By current Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.
>>> Darknet
JD Lasica’s blog on his book about Hollywood’s war against amateur digital filmmakers.
>>> The Technium
Former Wired editor Kevin Kelly is working through ideas for a book:

“As I write I will post here. The purpose of this site is to turn my posts into a conversation. I will be uploading my half-thoughts, notes, self-arguments, early drafts and responses to others’ postings as a way for me to figure out what I actually think.”

>>> End of Cyberspace by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Pang has some interesting thoughts on blogs as research tools:

“This begins to move you to a model of scholarly performance in which the value resides not exclusively in the finished, published work, but is distributed across a number of usually non-competitive media. If I ever do publish a book on the end of cyberspace, I seriously doubt that anyone who’s encountered the blog will think, “Well, I can read the notes, I don’t need to read the book.” The final product is more like the last chapter of a mystery. You want to know how it comes out.
“It could ultimately point to a somewhat different model for both doing and evaluating scholarship: one that depends a little less on peer-reviewed papers and monographs, and more upon your ability to develop and maintain a piece of intellectual territory, and attract others to it– to build an interested, thoughtful audience.”

* * * * *

This turned out much longer than I’d intended, and yet there’s a lot left to discuss. One question worth mulling over is whether the networked book is really a new idea at all. Don’t all books exist over time within social networks, “linked” to countless other texts? What about the Talmud, the Jewish compendium of law and exigesis where core texts are surrounded on the page by layers of commentary? Is this a networked book? Or could something as prosaic as a phone book chained to a phone booth be considered a networked book?
In our discussions, we have focused overwhelmingly on electronic books within digital networks because we are convinced that this is a major direction in which the book is (or should be) heading. But this is not to imply that the networked book is born in a vacuum. Naturally, it exists in a continuum. And just as our concept of the analog was not fully formed until we had the digital to hold it up against, perhaps our idea of the book contains some as yet undiscovered dimensions that will be revealed by investigating the networked book.

the networked book: an increasingly contagious idea

Farrar, Straus and Giroux have ventured into waters pretty much uncharted by a big commercial publisher, putting the entire text of one of their latest titles online in a form designed to be read inside a browser. “Pulse,” a sweeping, multi-disciplinary survey by Robert Frenay of “the new biology” — “the coming age of systems and machines inspired by living things” — is now available to readers serially via blog, RSS or email: two installments per day and once per day on weekends.
Naturally, our ears pricked up when we heard they were calling the thing a “networked book” — a concept we’ve been developing for the past year and a half, starting with Kim White’s original post here on “networked book/book as network.” Apparently, the site’s producer, Antony Van Couvering, had never come across if:book and our mad theories before another blogger drew the connection following Pulse’s launch last week. So this would seem to be a case of happy synergy. Let a hundred networked books bloom.
The site is nicely done, employing most of the standard blogger’s toolkit to wire the book into the online discourse: comments, outbound links (embedded by an official “linkologist”), tie-ins to social bookmarking sites, a linkroll to relevant blog carnivals etc. There are also a number of useful tools for exploring the book on-site: a tag cloud, a five-star rating system for individual entries, a full-text concordance, and various ways to filter posts by topic and popularity.
My one major criticism of the Pulse site is that the site is perhaps a little over-accessorized, the design informed less by the book’s inherent structure and themes than by a general enthusiasm for Web 2.0 tools. Pulse clearly was not written for serialization and does not always break down well into self-contained units, so is a blog the ideal reading environment or just the reading environment most readily at hand? Does the abundance of tools perhaps overcrowd the text and intimidate the reader? There has been very little reader commenting or rating activity so far.
But this could all be interpreted as a clever gambit: perhaps FSG is embracing the web with a good faith experiment in sharing and openness, and at the same time relying on the web’s present limitations as a reading interface (and the dribbling pace of syndication — they’ll be rolling this out until November 6) to ultimately drive readers back to the familiar print commodity. We’ll see if it works. In any event, this is an encouraging sign that publishers are beginning to broaden their horizons — light years ahead of what Harper Collins half-heartedly attempted a few months back with one of its more beleaguered titles.
I also applaud FSG for undertaking an experiment like this at a time when the most aggressive movements into online publishing have issued not from publishers but from the likes of Google and Amazon. No doubt, Googlezon’s encroachment into electronic publishing had something to do with FSG’s decision to go ahead with Pulse. Van Couvering urges publishers to take matters into their own hands and start making networked books:

Why get listed in a secondary index when you can be indexed in the primary search results page? Google has been pressuring publishers to make their books available through the Google Books program, arguing (basically) that they’ll get more play if people can search them. Fine, except Google may be getting the play. If you’re producing the content, better do it yourself (before someone else does it).

I hope tht Pulse is not just the lone canary in the coal mine but the first of many such exploratory projects.
Here’s something even more interesting. In a note to readers, Frenay talks about what he’d eventually like to do: make an “open source” version of the book online (incidentally, Yochai Benkler has just done something sort of along these lines with his new book, “The Wealth of Networks” — more on that soon):

At some point I’d like to experiment with putting the full text of Pulse online in a form that anyone can link into and modify, possibly with parallel texts or even by changing or adding to the wording of mine. I like the idea of collaborative texts. I also feel there’s value in the structure and insight that a single, deeply committed author can bring to a subject. So what I want to do is offer my text as an anchor for something that then grows to become its own unique creature. I like to imagine Pulse not just as the book I’ve worked so hard to write, but as a dynamic text that can continue expanding and updating in all directions, to encompass every aspect of this subject (which is also growing so rapidly).

This would come much closer to the networked book as we at the institute have imagined it: a book that evolves over time. It also chimes with Frenay’s theme of modeling technology after nature, repurposing the book as its own intellectual ecosystem. By contrast, the current serialized web version of Pulse is still very much a pre-network kind of book, its structure and substance frozen and non-negotiable; more an experiment in viral marketing than a genuine rethinking of the book model. Whether the open source phase of Pulse ever happens, we have yet to see.
But taking the book for a spin in cyberspace — attracting readers, generating buzz, injecting it into the conversation — is not at all a bad idea, especially in these transitional times when we are continually shifting back and forth between on and offline reading. This is not unlike what we are attempting to do with McKenzie Wark’s “Gamer Theory,” the latest draft of which we are publishing online next month. The web edition of Gamer Theory is designed to gather feedback and to record the conversations of readers, all of which could potentially influence and alter subsequent drafts. Like Pulse, Gamer Theory will eventually be a shelf-based book, but with our experiment we hope to make this networked draft a major stage in its growth, and to suggest what might lie ahead when the networked element is no longer just a version or a stage, but the book itself.