Digital Books and Flying Cars: The Library edition

peter brantley internet archive san francisco ca

Control over the publishing industry has shifted out of the hands of publishers.

concept of an “organizational ﬁeld” (deﬁned) often complex groups or sets of actors involved.

stable industry > stable network (and vice versa) for both organizations and people

Technology shifts can disrupts a ﬁeld … (means of production, means of distribution) radical change in ﬁeld members, and ultimately in its products or services.

In any organizational ﬁeld, market actors coalesce around an “axis of competition” product | pricing | services

Deep cutting technology shifts in production and distribution remove the ability to focus on any single axis at a time.

Disruption of core fundamentals even creates conﬂicts emerging from a redeﬁnition of old assets: … a “backward lens”

For example: Digital rights for older backlist titles, where rights to the latent rents were never negotiated.

Outcome: Rosetta; Andrew Wylie v. Random House HarperCollins v. Open Road Media

Diﬃcult enough issue to have a separate appendix in the GBS settlement proposal (“Author-‐Publisher Procedures”).

As content emerges in diﬀerent channels, role vs function conﬂict develops: authors | agents | publishers | retailers Functions no longer “captured” by orgs.

Tech shifts permits new ﬁrms to enter, sunder existing networks, and disrupt existing “resource dependencies”.

Call into question the very viability of older ﬁrms and organizations.

Imagine consumer 3-‐d printable aerocar templates on torrents, competing with existing cars.

Org. ﬁelds in turmoil are subject to a wildﬁre development of emergent markets, new patterns of competition.

Amazon’s kindle … Neither the ereader nor the ebook were new creations, but intro into a disrupted publishing ﬁeld made all the diﬀerence.

Apple and Amazon are something new: comprehensive, proprietary consumer-‐ facing content-‐distribution platforms.

Both companies have created media consumption portals with tablet and catalog support.

Not concerned with historical relationships, seeking proﬁt in disruption, and with a wildly diﬀerent understanding of their competition.

Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook are network-‐centric platforms focused on a technically-‐enabled monetization of web traﬃc, driving consumption.

Reliance on web technologies enables new forms of content to be developed, new authoring platforms to be created.

Apple iPad apps and interactive books are previously unimaginable art forms. There will be many more to come.

Concepts from the software industry: new realms of info design + arch, and opportunities for user experience, can re-‐invent books and journals.

Digital tech enables … •  highly mobile content delivery; •  machine based auto-‐curation; •  linked open data relationships; •  semantically driven associations.

New forms of product innovation permit core industry standards to be suborned by disruptive ﬁrms.

EPUB  EPUB3 in order to compete vs. Apple/Android apps, only to see EPUB3 adopted as a foundation for proprietary enhancements.

Platforms optimize for hardware, while designers maximize artistry. Growing silos of unique content, loss of universal discovery and access.

Loss of control over format standards that would otherwise buttress industry competition. No MP3 for books.

Eﬀorts to leverage previous network relationships, mechanics only serves to create unexpected consequences.

Publishers attempt to re-‐assert control of market pricing and distribution channels as they lose control over product deﬁnition. Agency pricing …

Even putting aside DoJ intervention, agency pricing can never re-‐write the new relationships and dynamics in publishing.

Old network of relationships in the publishing industry is no longer useful; ties that bound actors together have been sundered.

In the shadow of Apple and Amazon – a whole new ecosystem of technology-‐ based publishing startups is emerging on the coasts premised on disruption.

Network enables new forms of awareness, machine self-‐learning is beginning to associate people with information in new ways.

Sometimes scary. Struggle imminent to deﬁne our relationship with networks that are increasingly aware of our needs for information.

“Waving at the machine” We will have to grow into a new understanding of how we share information through the network.

“Hold Hands”, wickenden, Flickr

Libraries and universities need not be consumers of technology, but rather can take adv. of new technology directly.

Re-‐thinking ﬂow … By publishing’s disruption, public and research libraries can deliver services for and with (not “to”) their users.

Being able to consider story telling and data as software reshapes how scholars engage with their peers and the public.

New authoring tools and platforms enable scholars to have more direct control over how/where they publish (e.g. Wordpress: Annotum).

Academic authors can publish outside traditional journal publishing systems – Oppty for hyper local publishing platforms.

People and groups can create their own own micro-‐publishing sites, and publish directly on web-‐based journals. “Push” to publish …

PLoS One, PeerJ, and related ilk … that minimally gate submissions: 1) is it a new and original work; 2) does it report on primary research?; 3) is it technically rigorous?

And if we posit that all information has the potential to be equally discoverable on the web, do we need PLOS One?

By redirecting its resources over the next few years, a university can provide enough publishing services of its own to eliminate subventions.

Between libraries and presses, societies and membership associations, between authors and readers, a new continuum of publishing services can be designed.

Enabling scholars to publish, and readers (both lay and academic) to write back into the world for themselves.

He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew Now recks no lord but the stiletto’s Thorn, And Tacit lies the Gold once-‐knotted horn. No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero.

peter brantley director, bookserver project internet archive @naypinya (twitter, gmail)

Digital Books and Flying Cars: The Library edition

by Peter Brantley

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