Originally published in Searcher, Vol. 14 No. 10 — Nov./Dec. 2006

PUBLISHING TRENDS
The Book as Place:
The “Networked Book” Becomes the New “In” Destination
by Paula Berinstein

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Remember when bookstores were simple spaces filled only with shelves and a checkout counter? Hushed as a proverbial library they were and serious places of business. Then, about 15 years ago, an odd thing happened: Suddenly, you were not only allowed to sit and read, you were encouraged to do so as bookstores came to resemble living rooms, with comfy chairs and conversation pits. And then, lo and behold, the cardinal rule “no food, no drink” was casually discarded as bookstores began to incorporate — gasp — cafes on their premises. To a classically trained librarian, taught to worry about silverfish and mold, this development was truly weird. But the bookstore had evolved and there was no regressing. The mere shop was on its way to becoming a Greek agora cum literary salon.

As if that were the end! No, evolution continues apace, and now it’s the book itself, rather than its place of residence, that brings us together. The book is now a place as well as a thing and you can find its location mapped in cyberspace.

Of course, books transport us to other places — some real, some imaginary. And books are places of a sort themselves, with a geography of pages, sections, and features such as tables of contents and indexes. A few even sport topographical features including pop-ups and clear overlays. But even though they inspire us to come together to talk about them, until now, books have not functioned as meeting places.

Enter the networked book: the new agora/plaza/forum where authors, publishers, and readers congregate to ponder, discuss, joke, enjoy, and refer. With the advent of blogging; the advent of Google, Amazon, and soon Microsoft book searches; and an audience of Web 2.0 collaborators, the book is becoming searchable, linkable, multimedia-able, comment-able, annotate-able, preview-able, aggregate-able, correlate-able, syndicate-able, feed-able, e-mail-able, Flickr-able, deli.cio.us-able, digg-able — in fact, divisible and mutable.

What Is a Networked Book?

But what is this multifaceted “networked book”? Let’s look at an example: The Institute for the Future of the Book in Brooklyn, N.Y., has mounted an experiment using a book called Gamer Theory [http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory], which the author, McKenzie Wark, spells GAM3R 7H30RY. Posted on the Web as a draft, this book, which looks at games as a major media form, invites reader comments, some of which Wark intends to incorporate into his final printed version. The idea is to test the hypothesis that feedback and conversations, both at the site and elsewhere, would lead to a better book.

GAM3R 7H30RY doesn’t look like other books. Carefully crafted as nine chapters of exactly 25 paragraphs each, the book appears as a set of clickable index cards, each containing one of the 25 paragraphs side by side with reader comments. Wark, an academic used to leading discussions, has taken an active part, answering questions and responding to readers’ points. Harvard University Press will publish the book in the spring of 2007; the institute will also provide a full online edition.

At the same time, the institute has been sponsoring another networked book: Without Gods: Toward a History of Disbelief by Mitchell Stephens of New York University [http://www.futureofthebook.org/mitchellstephens]. Unlike Wark’s book, Stephens’ experiment has taken the form of a traditional blog, with scrolling vertical entries and one-click-away comments from readers. However, the aim is the same. As Stephens says, “Our hope is that the conversation will be joined: ideas challenged, facts corrected, queries answered; that lively and intelligent discussion will ensue.”

As these experiments have progressed, the Institute for the Future of the Book has maintained a blog to discuss not only the organization itself, but the networked book in general. At the if:book site [http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog], institute Fellow Ben Vershbow and colleagues have mused on the definition and implications of the networked book. Searcher caught up with Vershbow and colleague Jesse Wilbur and asked them a plethora of questions: What is a networked book? What are the implications for authors, publishers, readers, and librarians? Will networked books change the world? and more. Their answers will challenge, inspire, excite, and — perhaps — disturb you.

We begin with a definition: “A networked book is social,” explains Vershbow. “It incorporates feedback mechanisms and discussion platforms in its overall structure.” Sounds like a blog. He continues, “It has the possibility of being distributed in its composition rather than being a discrete media object, which is the way we’re used to thinking about books or really any kind of media.” In other words, it’s collaborative:

It could be a sort of frame placed around various remote assets that could be on disparate servers,” he says. It’s a collection, then — a way of looking at different things in different places as if, when taken together, they form a whole thing.

And I think — maybe most importantly — a networked book is organic and is more about process than product. It’s always evolving over time and being impacted and changed by the various interactions going through it, the various revisions that it’s going through, and various annotations that readers and other authors and other nodes in the network are adding to it.

So a networked book is many things: a hub, a facilitator, a lively entity that brings people together to discuss and experiment. It’s both process and product. And it’s organic, changing size, shape, texture — even its nature — over time. Kind of like a university, but available to everyone who has an Internet connection (and can speak the language). It’s the ultimate democratic instrument: seductive to many, threatening to others.

What Does a Networked Book Look Like?

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