Intellectual Property Law

Book Publishers' Manifesto

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

Leslie Johnston has pointed me to Sara Lloyd's "Book Publisher's Manifesto for the 21st Century."

It's an interesting read. Check it out.

We will need to think much less about products and much more about content; we will need to think of ?the book? as a core or base structure but perhaps one with more porous edges than it has had before. We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain. We will need to recognise that readers are also writers and opinion formers and that those operate online within and across networks. We will need to understand that parts of books reference parts of other books and that now the network of meaning can be woven together digitally in a very real way, between content published and hosted by entirely separate entities. Perhaps most radically, we will have to consider whether a primary focus on text is enough in a world of multimedia mash-ups. In other words, publishers will need to think entirely differently about the very nature of the book and, in parallel, about how to market and sell those ?books? in the context of a wired world. Crucially, we will need to work out how we can add value as publishers within a circular, networked environment.

and

Publishers need to provide the tools of interaction and communication around book content and to be active within the digital spaces in which readers can discuss and interact with their content. It will no doubt become standard for digital texts to provide messaging and commenting functions alongside the core text, to enable readers to connect with other readers of the same text and to open up a dialogue with them. Readers are already connecting with each other ? through blogs, discussion forums, social book-marking sites, book cataloguing sites and wikis. Publishers need to be at the centre of these digital conversations, driving their development and providing the tools for readers to engage with the text and with each other if they are to remain relevant.

All of this is what the Institute for the Future of the Book is all about. Stay tuned!

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on June 11, 2008 (boomark / email).