Much as blogs have bitten into the news business and YouTube has challenged television, digital self-publishing is creating a powerful new niche in books that's threatening the traditional industry. Once derided as “vanity” titles by the publishing establishment, self-published books suddenly are able to thrive by circumventing the establishment.

via Digital Self-Publishing Shakes Up Traditional Book Industry — WSJ.com.

It’s finally possible to skip the traditional publishers altogether, publishing yourself (via Amazon, for example), and get discovered by fans directly! Of course, you’re own your own with editing (contract it out? ask the significant other?) and advertising (social media, anyone?), and there are no advances on your sales.

On the other hand, there’s no publisher telling you what you can and cannot say (but then again, there’s no publisher/editor telling you what you should say and shouldn’t say…), and no sending your manuscript in–and then never hearing back with more than a form letter.

Instead, you write great stuff, put it up through Amazon, some fans discover you and… presto! You’re rich & famous! Amazon’s discovery algorithms help with this (the more people read and like your work, the more often it gets recommended), but you still need to get that critical mass started (which is one thing a publisher can do for you).

So this is great for fiction. I wonder if it has any possibilities for academic work? How would a department rate your self-published book in terms of tenure decisions? By number of copies sold? (But academic works never sell much.) Somehow, I suspect the academic world will be very, very slow to accept self-published works as “real” publications…

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The future of reading blurs reading and writing. The future of reading is the networking of readers, writers, content, comments, and metadata, all in one continuous-on mash.

via The iPad is the future of the past of books.

Extending this thought into the realm of the university, Jim Milles questions scholars’ desire for Weinberger’s vision of the future:

Apart from a small subset of blogger/scholars, that doesn’t seem to be happening at all.  Perhaps it’s due to the training that most law faculty receive now–not just the J.D., but the long, perfection-oriented dissertation process–but in my experience, law professors and other sociolegal scholars are extremely reluctant (if not phobic) about releasing to the public anything other than a fully fleshed-out article.

via The Future of Reading, or Do Scholars Really Want “Social Scholarship”? « Buffalo Wings and Toasted Ravioli.

As a budding scholar of law and history, I second Milles’ observations. There are, as he points out, some bloggers who discuss their scholarship and work online, in an open fashion, but by far the vast majority of scholars I know and work with do not do this. Some in-progress scholarship makes it into SSRN in a draft form. Even more makes it online once it is actually published, although most of it remains behind subscription walls and is inaccessible except to other scholars (or dedicated readers who seek it out). But neither SSRN nor online journals encourage or facilitate the back-and-forth sharing of Weinberger’s vision of the future of reading as social.

The relatively few scholars who post to blogs or other online systems that might facilitate “social scholarship” tend to post material of a more informal sort, including initial reactions to current events or hot topics of current discussion. Very few blog posts develop research or concepts in detail, and even fewer do so in a fashion that does not react to something current.

In a sense, the social scholarship that does exist tends to be more like a cocktail party than a colloquium or even a conference presentation.

Personally, this tends to be how I blog as well. The material I put online via my blog sometimes informs my larger research projects, but mostly I am focused on snippets of thoughts, initial reactions, and concepts I wish to capture for later.

Partly this may be due to the form of blogging, or of reading online: shorter tends to work better, and hot and trending topics tend to attract more broad interest. (The down side of “crowd sourcing”?)

I like to more fully develop, research, and think about my scholarship before I share it, and when I do share it, I tend to have a different, more specialized audience in mind. My online writing tends to consist of more assertions and fewer citations; my scholarship is the opposite.

Is this just a “natural” consequence of different mediums? Would scholars be better off publishing in a more “social” (technologically social, that is) fashion? Is one way better than the other? And if social reading is the future — or should be the future — is the iPad a step in the wrong direction?

While this generally irks mostly customers — and not very many customers have even experienced this as yet, since the e-reader market is new — some publishers and authors feel this negatively impacts their customer relationship.

Now Amazon has made it easier — or at least made the choice more explicit — for small-scale publishers to decide what kind of relationship with their readers they would like to have:

Without a formal announcement, Amazon.com has started allowing authors to publish their ebooks for the Kindle without digital rights management (DRM), the technology that limits how consumers can use the ebooks they’ve bought.

via Amazon quietly lets publishers remove DRM from Kindle ebooks » Nieman Journalism Lab.

While this doesn’t impact the larger ecosystem, it’s a step that takes e-readers closer to where the behemoth of music sellers has already gone: last year Apple switched off DRM for music tracks purchased through iTunes.

Many publishers and authors fear the results of rampant copying and eagerly embrace DRM as a solution. I personally feel this is the wrong choice, and there is some limited data to back me up. Nonetheless, the real story here is that Amazon is making it easier for authors and publishers — at least small-scale ones — to choose, and putting that choice up front. At the very least, this forces a brief moment of thought, and hopefully it will generate additional data about whether DRM benefits or harms sales and customer relations.

Now that I’m on my second quarter of a PhD program in the History of Science, I am continuing to think about why I am doing this and what history  has to offer, both to me and to the world at large. One concern I already have is with the apparent obsession with the book as the primary mechanism of disseminating the work of historians.

To begin with, I’ve noticed a tendency in the discipline of history — common in many disciplines, of course — to focus inward (or backward?) and to avoid engagement with the rest of society. In departments of history right now, there is a distinct, and understandable, preoccupation with budget cuts and the lack of tenure-track faculty positions. The latter issue has caused a certain sense of crisis in history departments, especially amongst graduate students who are now consistently warned about the lack of jobs and the challenges of adjunct teaching. The former should lead to an increasing desire to justify the place of history (and its departments) in academy and society. Surprisingly, however, I have not seen a great deal of such justification as yet. Mostly I have instead seen the discipline continue to focus on the itself and its own concerns — to draw inwards. Academic disciplines are conservative, though, and a shift to engage with contemporary society in a real way is not easy.

That said, certainly I have seen a newer generation of historians focus on socially relevant issues, including culture, ethnicity, technology, etc. I have not, though, seen this focus reflected in the marketing or communications of the discipline. The shift to greater societal engagement, then, is not so much about contemporary issues, but is instead a problem of a failure to engage effectively with meaningful mechanisms of modern communications.

While I do believe that Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other forms of social media are one potential means of communication yet to be engaged with fully by historians, I see this failure reflected more basically in a disciplinary obsession with full-length books (as opposed to article-length pieces or other shorter scholarly works). The tendency in my history seminars is to assign these long books for discussion. Legal, medical and scientific scholars, on the other hand, prefer journal articles to books (with the exception of textbooks, which serve a different purpose).

History values the book first. Publishing your dissertation as a book is essentially required if you want a chance at a tenure-track position. Reading at least a book per week per seminar is mandatory. Google Books is revolutionary, as it provides electronic access to books, something that is hardly revolutionary when it comes to articles!

Books can be wonderful, and can capture the sweep of history in a way that an article cannot. Such a sweeping approach, pulling the reader along for the ride, can make for good story-based history if well written, well edited, and not too caught up in historical detail. (General readers don’t want footnotes!) If more historians produces this kind of work, that might be a great thing for public understanding, and might even benefit the discipline. But those aren’t the books I’m talking about.

Most of the books I see in history are aimed at other historians (though they might pretend to be readable by the public, to try to entice a publisher to bite). Even the really good ones could often have been cut in half with some good editing. They certainly would have been more useful to me as a scholar if they had been published as a focused series of articles. And despite my sense that a good book aimed at the general public can be a great thing, wouldn’t more shorter pieces that are accessible at least to inform journalists — or as resources beyond Wikipedia — also benefit the public rather directly? I think people generally are expecting shorter, tighter, more focused written work today, for good or ill. I also think historians should stop fighting that trend, and start embracing it.

Honestly, I don’t know whether the general public would read more history if it were shorter. (Despite my hopes, I suspect not.) But I do think the work of historians could be more readily accessible to other disciplines — law, medicine, sociology, and so on — if their works were packaged in a more focused form than the book. This might go a long ways towards justifying the utility of history within the academy by encouraging other disciplines to make use of its work. Combine this greater accessibility with greater use of social media and modern self-marketing tools, along with a strong dose of the ongoing trend to engage with contemporary issues (while informing that engagement with a strong dose of historical understanding)  and I think historians and their discipline would receive a much higher valuation from both within and without the university.

So how about it, historians? Can you give up your precious books?

Now the Obama Administration (specifically, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP) is considering extending the policy to other federal agencies that fund academic research.

via Putting the “Public” In Publicly-Funded Research | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I am a big supporter of open access to research. I think it provides a large public benefit at a minimal cost to anyone, even private publishers (who, I think, can and do make most of their profit on rapid dissemination of new materials to those who want them now, not six months or more later). Yes, publishers add some value through editorial management and processing, but most authors aren’t compensated, and many publishers are making large profits without adding enough value to justify the cost.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been giving a lot of thought over the weekend to the problem of finding good content buried amidst all the noise on the Internet, especially when it comes to blog articles from lesser-known sources. (This is true for readers looking for quality content, but it’s also true for authors seeking readers.) Although I’ve been struggling with this problem for a while, this recent post from Louis Gray really resonated with me:

In essence, the incentives, for the most part, do not tilt in favor of writing unique stories or doing the required research necessary to get a full story, to get quotes from a source, or find data points that back up analysis.

There are going to be pockets of the Web that harbor original ideas, a focus on quality and data, and there are going to be other places where copying, scraping, and shortcuts are going to rule the day.

via louisgray.com: Growing Grumblings on Tech News Don’t Address Incentives.

I run into this problem when, as a researcher, I seek useful analysis on topics I am investigating. Google tends to turn up sources with high “PageRank,” which reflects a certain “wisdom of the crowds” when it comes to breaking stories, but stumbles when looking for more specific content, or insightful analysis. I often have to wade through what Mike Arrington of TechCrunch calls “fast-food content” from content mills of various sorts (including, often, well-known blogs).

As a result, I turn to sources I know (like SSRN or blogs I already know who are not quite on target) and spend inordinate amounts of time painstakingly, manually finding decent sources of information (which usually means big blogs). Usually I miss the odd, insightful posts from “little guy” blogs.

Note that turning up top blogs in niche is not too hard (Alltop is a good place to start). Many of them are quite good (the crowd is good for something), especially for getting the pulse of a niche.

But what happens when you want something beyond the latest and greatest happenings? What about all those little blogs out there that occasionally produce brilliant content, but are never going to compete (and probably aren’t trying to) with TechCrunch (or even louisgray.com)?

Regular journalism (Salon, for example) can be good for this (especially in politics), although the lack of links to sources makes it difficult to use such pieces as launching points for more research. (More academic articles are better for this, but can be long, complex, and specialized.)

Some ideas, thoughts, and sources:

• I encourage well-known bloggers and big blogs to link to lesser-known, but insightful posts on blogs — even if the small guy is not an up-and-coming, next-big-thing discovery. (It would be great if journalists could do the same, but since traditional news outlets seem unable to move forward to embrace the Web, I don’t hold out much hope for this.)
• Digg and Reddit can sometimes turn up good content, but this is another case of crowdsourcing not always producing good results. Content that rises tends to fall into certain patterns and appeal to a certain demographic or mindset. Good, but uninteresting-to-the-masses articles tend to get classified with spam.
• StumbleUpon can be better than Reddit or Digg at allowing niche content, but because it tends to feel random, it’s use for specific research is limited — I’ve never had much luck searching it for useful content.
• Google (and its competitors) should consider finding a way to “de-rank” content mills in some fashion. (Yes, I know they provide a good deal of revenue via advertising, so perhaps this will never happen.) Meanwhile, Google Blog Search and Google Scholar are useful, if imperfect, tools.
• Web tools like AllTop and PostRank are useful tools, although both tend to highlight top blogs in a niche, not top posts (which is still very useful).
• “Bog rolls” are still useful sources, even if their use is dying off, but again tend to turn up niche blogs, not specific content.
• Academic sources like SSRN, or PubMed, are useful for certain kinds of specific research, but they can be too specialized and too in-depth.

Any other ideas? I’m still looking.

Image by ramesh.rasaiyan via Flickr

Techdirt discusses why you shouldn’t be concerned if someone “steals” your work and sells it, noting that “it’s not necessarily a bad thing”:

If someone actually figures out something that works well, then that’s useful info to us, and would allow us to then incorporate those findings into our own offering. That’s actually good for everyone…

via Is It Really Such A Problem If People Sell Your Works? Or Is It Just Free Market Research? | Techdirt.

I don’t disagree with this reasoning, at least in the case of the professional production of intellectual property (not necessarily for profit), and most especially when the producer continues to produce content. Thus, this idea makes perfect sense in the case of Techdirt (or most media companies, Twitterers, blogs, newspapers, and so on), since their real value is not in any one particular story, but rather in the relationship between readers/consumers and producers/innovators.

I do worry about “one-off” artists — painters, designers, novelists, musicians — anyone who may invest countless hours in the production of a single item that can then be easily reproduced at virtually zero cost. (Note that my above points would apply to a music label, perhaps, or even a movie studio, since they produce a constant stream of content which can create relationships.) How do we encourage the small-time innovator who may not produce more than a few works? How do we keep free-riders (I might include music labels and publishers in this list…) from discouraging true, one-off innovations by people who may not be interested in innovating in business as well?

I do not have a good answer to this, but I think it’s an important question. (I also think this possibility is used by media companies to “hide the ball” when it comes to their desire to hold onto profitable IP.) If we don’t find some way to resolve it, I suspect we may never have proper IP reform that works for the “little guy.”

Ever since electronic books emerged as a major growth market, New York’s largest publishing houses have worried that big-name authors might sign deals directly with e-book retailers or other new ventures, bypassing traditional publishers entirely.

Now, one well-known author is doing just that.

Stephen R. Covey, one of the most successful business authors of the last two decades, has moved e-book rights for two of his best-selling books from his print publisher, Simon & Schuster, a division of the CBS Corporation, to a digital publisher that will sell the e-books to Amazon.com for one year.

via Stephen R. Covey Grants E-Book Rights to Amazon — NYTimes.com.

I predict we’ll see more of this, unless traditional publishers provide more value to authors than they do now.

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The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) — suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. If so, the demise of academic copyright should be achieved by a change in law, for the ‘open access’ movement that effectively seeks this objective without modification of the law faces fundamental difficulties.

via “Should Copyright Of Academic Works Be Abolished?” | Berkman Center.

An interesting proposal that I look forward to reading in more detail. My gut feeling is that, as an academic author, I would be comfortable with this, provided attribution was mandated (as with Creative Commons, which is really based on copyright). After all, while I do not expect to profit directly from any academic work I produce, I need the attribution to me to stay in order to survive in an academic profession that rewards publications and writings. If I lose the attribution, I lose that.

As I said, I look forward to reading Professor Shavell’s draft article in more depth.

Ed Kohler points us to a long, but fascinating blog post, by Stuart Shieber, a CS professor at Harvard, discussing the somewhat ridiculous copyright situation that many academics deal with in trying to promote their own works. I’ve heard similar stories from other professors I know, but this one is worth reading. Shieber points out the importance of academics getting their research published in journals, but how annoying it is that most journals require those academics to give up all sorts of rights — including the right to distribute their own research on their websites. However, he notes that most published academics simply ignore this rule, and you end up with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Even though they’re legally prevented from putting up a PDF of their work on their website, they do so anyway, and journals just look the other way.

via The Ridiculous Copyright Situation Faced By Academics Who Want To Promote Their Own Research | Techdirt.

Traditional journals and publishers make this deal required for authors, especially in the sciences. In medical journals, the NIH open-access mandate has opened up this to some extent, since it requires authors to get consent to put their article in PubMed Central. The restriction is understandable, though, given publisher’s old business models. But the world is changing, and journals — scientific and otherwise — are having to adapt.

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