Post-Artifact

Books and

Publishing

WHAT IS A BOOK, anymore, anyway? We will always debate: the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display; the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting; location by page, location by paragraph.

Stop there.

Hunting surface analogs between the printed and the digital book is a dangerous honeypot. There is a compulsion to believe the magic of a book lies in its surface.

In reality, the book worth considering consists only of relationships. Relationships between ideas and recipients. Between writer and reader. Between readers and other readers — all as writ over time.

The future book — the digital book — is no longer an immutable brick. It's ethereal and networked,emerging publicly in fits and starts. An artifact ‘complete’ for only the briefest of moments. Shifting deliberately. Layered with our shared marginalia. And demanding engagement with the promise of community implicit in its form.

The book of the past reveals its individual experience uniquely. The book of the future reveals our collective experience uniquely.

For those of us looking to shape the future of books and publishing, where do we begin? Simply, these are our truths:

The way books are written has changed. The canvas for books has changed. The post-published life of a book has changed.

To think about the future of the book is to understand the links between these changes. To think about the future of the book is to think about the future of all content. So intertwined are our words and images and platforms, that to consider individual parts of the publishing process in isolation is to miss transformative connections.

These connections shaping books and publishing live in emergent systems behind the words. Between the writing and the publishing, publishing and consuming, consuming and sharing.

We have an opportunity now to shape these systems. And in doing so, to refine the relationships between authors, publishers, readers and texts.

What tools will we embed within digital artifacts to signal this shifting relationship with literature? To surface our shared experience? To bridge the raw pre- and post- artifact spaces that so define the future of publishing? build the future book?

Books are systems.

They emerge from systems. They themselves are systems — the best of which are as complex as is necessary, and not one bit more. And once complete, new systems develop around their content.

To understand where books and publishing are moving, it is critical to understand the following three systems:

• the pre-artifact system
• the system of the artifact
• the post-artifact system

The pre-artifact system is where the book or story or article is made. It’s a system full of (and fueled by) whiskey, self-doubt, confusion, debauchery and a general sense of hopelessness. Traditionally, it’s been a system of isolation, involving very few people. The key individuals within the classic manifestation of this system are the author and the editor. A publisher, perhaps. A muse. But generally, not the reader. The end product of this system is what we usually define as ‘the book’ — the Idea made tangible.

The artifact — the book — too, is a system. Traditionally, an island unto itself. Immutable. A system self-contained. One requiring great efforts to extend beyond the binding. When finished, it becomes a souvenir of a private journey.

Finally, the post-artifact system. This is the space in which we engage the artifact. Again, traditionally a relatively static space. Isolated. Friends can gather to discuss the artifact. Localized classes can be constructed in universities around the artifact. But, generally, there is an overwhelming sense of disconnection from the other systems.

Digital changes this.

Most fundamentally digital removes isolation. Removes it from the pre-, artifact, and post- systems. The corollaries: an increase in connectivity. Mutability of artifact. Continuous engagement with readers. And most excitingly, a potentially public record of change, comment, discussion — digital marginalia — layered atop the artifact, adding to the artifact, and redefining ‘complete.’

With the connection of these systems, our classic definition of a literary artifact no longer applies. And our common understanding of publishing systems is irrevocably disrupted.

With the emergence and growing adoption of the Kindle and the iPad, publishers, writers, readers and software-makers have concerned themselves with shoehorning the old-media image of a book into new media. Everyone asks, ‘How do we change books to read them digitally?’ But the more interesting question is, ‘How does digital change books?’ And, similarly, ‘How does digital change the authorship process?’

With digital impermanence (a new kind of ephemerality) comes two concepts key to the future of storytelling and books:

• We can continuously develop a text in realtime, erasing the preciousness imbued by printing. And because of this ...
• Time itself becomes an active ingredient in authorship (in contrast to authorship happening in a seemingly timeless place, a finished product suddenly emerging).

Wikipedia is a fully realized example of how digital drastically affects authorship. By creating a system that allows collective edits in real-time, Wikipedia has embedded iterative writing into its foundation. Nothing on that site is precious. No letter, word, sentence or article is immune to reconsideration. And yet, by tracking changes on a micro scale, they’ve built trust around a continuously evolving system.

Consider the physical analog to Wikipedia — the encyclopedia set. In the early naughts, it would have been difficult to imagine that a website written and edited by hundreds of thousands of people, constantly mutating, could have possibly formed the replacement for that dusty set of leather bound books on your bookshelf. And yet, not only has Wikipedia replaced the physical encyclopedia for many of us, but it’s surpassed it in usefulness, quality, timeliness and perhaps most significantly, convenience. The core editorial ethos of the physical encyclopedia still informs Wikipedia, but the ways in which content is created, shared, and edited are born from digital.

When we think about digital’s effect on storytelling, we tend to grasp for the lowest hanging imaginative fruits. The common cliche is that digital will ‘bring stories to life.’ Words will move. Pictures become movies. Narratives will be choose-your-own-adventure. While digital does make all of this possible, these are the changes of least radical importance brought about by digitization of text. These are the answers to the question, “How do we change books to make them digital?” The essence of digital’s effect on publishing requires a subtle shift towards the query: “How does digital change books?”

The list continues indefinitely. To be even more hyperbolic: we are amidst undeniable, fundamental change to authoring processes. The friction and distance between you and your readership? Gone.

The ‘live iteration‘ born from these changes frees authors from isolation (but still allows them to write in isolation). The audience and author become conversant sooner. Writers can gauge reader interest as the story unfolds and decide which topics are worth further exploration. As 37Signals, Frank, John, Robin, Amanda and Seth refined their authorial philosophy before an audience of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of readers, it’s easy to imagine the subtle editorial push and pull by the number of page views and comments they received on each blog entry. Which is to say, these frictionless, often indirect reader actions brought by digital to the pre-artifact system can manifest in the final authorial output.

Richard Nash of Soft Skull publishing fame and more recently founder of literary startup Cursor, has placed this pre-artifact system squarely in his sights. On why the disruption of the pre-artifact system is so necessary — hell, even morally required — he says:

His new imprint, Red Lemonade, is built to elicit conversations around books. Often before they're complete. Certainly a terrifying notion for many, but also an inevitable product of the opening of the pre-artifact system. And like many things inevitable in the evolution of entrenched methodologies — you can either bemoan and lament and eulogize the old, or become an active participant in the shaping of the future.

Of course, no author is obligated to embrace or engage these changes. But these changes do beg the question: just where does the digital artifact begin and end? When is it ‘completed?’

The digital book is a strange beast. It’s intangible and yet wholly mutable. Everywhere and nowhere. We own it, but yet, don’t. Its qualities mimic physical books only on a meta-level.

To truly understand how strange and special they are, it helps to have experience with their analog cousins. Have you ever made a physical book before? What I mean is, have you ever edited and sent the files to a printer to be reproduced several thousand times? It’s terrifying. There is a pervasive hopelessness to the entire process. You know there must be mistakes. Check page numbers and punctuation a hundred times still, and by the sheer magnitude of molecules composing a book, you will miss something.

So submitting that file to be printed is to place ultimate faith in the book. To believe — because you must for the sake of sanity! — that this is the best you can do given the constraints. And you will have to live with the results forever

This is what makes physical so weighty. So precious. No matter how much you prepare, if you haven’t executed well, any misstep will be writ a thousand times over.

When someone says ‘book’ this is what we think of (but, curiously, we may be one of the last generations to think this). A very specific physicality. We imagine the thick cover. The well defined interior block. We feel the permanence of the object. Inside, the words are embedded in the paper. What’s printed there today will be the same stuff tomorrow. It’s reliable.

With digital, these qualities of printed books listed above become artificial. There is no thick cover constraining length. There are no additional printing costs for color. There is no permanence: the once sacred, unchanging nature of the text is sacred no longer. Updating digital text is trivially easy. When you look at the same digital book tomorrow, it may very well be different from the version you read today.

Outside of these obvious superficial differences, there are two qualities to digital artifacts that make them drastically different from physical artifacts:

• they have a deep, interwoven connection with the pre- and post- artifact systems
• they exist in the classical ‘complete’ form for only the briefest of instances

The connection with the pre-artifact system is obvious. For example, the ‘artifact’ output of a Wikipedia entry is a continued iteration — the product of a highly specialized pre-artifact system.

The artifacts emerging from Domino owe nearly everything to the existence of a pre-artifact system — the vetting of ideas on a blog, the conversation with readers.

Once a physical artifact is ‘completed,’ printed, boxed and shipped, it’s done. It can’t change.24 We may scribble notes in the margins of our copy, but the next person to pick up a different copy won’t see those notes. They get the same blank ‘complete’ edition we got.

For only the briefest of instances — seconds, perhaps, for popular authors — does the digital edition of a book exist in this static, classic, ‘complete’ form. The moment a Kindle edition of a book is downloaded and highlighted it has been altered. The next person to download a copy of that book will be downloading the ‘complete’ form plus all associated marginalia. And the greater the integration of systems of marginalia, the greater the impact that subsequent conversations around the book will have on future readers.

Reading is, if nothing else, telepathy. Stephen King, in On Writing, after describing a table with a red cloth, cage, rabbit and blue number eight:

But — and here’s the real magic — it’s a shared telepathy. A telepathy from one to many, and in that, the many have experiential overlap. Printed matter binds this experience to pulp. With digital, there is the promise of networking that shared experience.

We give form to our private telepathy through marginalia — marks, highlights, notes in the margins.

Years ago, I remember — before Kindles and iPads and before anyone knew of EPUB — hearing about the marginalia found in the books of Paul Rand’s library. I remember thinking how exciting it would be to browse his thoughts. To sort by them. To order them and share them. Use them as pivots for discussions. Comment around them. Draw lines from them and the books to which they were connected, to other books and the thoughts of other designers. To unlock, as it were, the marks of his telepathic experiences.

It's the system that transforms the book from isolated vessel for text into a shared interface. It's a system that's beginning to appear in fits and starts in reading applications we use today. It’s the system most directly connected with readers. And it’s a system that, when executed well, makes going back to printed books feel positively neutered.

Structurally, marginalia represents a potentially infinite layering atop the content. Manifested properly, each new person who participates in the production of digital marginalia changes the reading experience of that book for the next person. Analog marginalia doesn't know other analog marginalia. Digital marginalia is a collective conversation, cumulative stratum.

Marginalia is, of course, nothing new. Like old Paul Rand, as long as we’ve had books we’ve been scribbling in them. Spilling coffee on them. Covering them in the dirt and dust of travel. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes unknowingly marking them with memories.

One classic manifestation of this mental detritus is the commonplace book. Liz Danzico expounds:

I outlined several requests for the networked book around notes and marginalia in my April 2010 essay Embracing the Digital Book. “Show me the overlap of 10,000 readers' highlighted passages in a digital book,” I demanded. “Let Stefan Sagmeister publicly share the passages he’s highlighted in the new Murakami Haruki novel.”

I then went on:

Soon after I completed that article Amazon released their Popular Highlights functionality.

Of all the large forces in the world of digital books, few are pushing forward as hard and fast as Amazon. They have already constructed the infrastructure for our networked commonplace books. It needs work, of course, but it’s a start.

So — just what is a book, anymore, anyway? To answer that is to look at the changes in our publishing systems.

• Engagement with readers (the building of community and conversation) begins immediately in the pre-artifact system.
• The line between Publisher and Author is blurred.
• If you choose to print, The Great Immutable Artifact is now only The Immutable Artifact.
• The production time (from finished manuscript to readers' hands) of a digital artifact is significantly less than that of a physical book.
• The classic authority of access to distribution is heavily deemphasized in digital. Digital distribution channels such as Amazon's Kindle store and Apple's iBooks store are universally accessible. Anyone with an ePub file can reach critical, global points of sale.
• A true networked post-artifact system of additive conversation and marginalia exists only digitally.

THIS, NOW -

As I stated before, we will always debate: the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display; the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting; location by page, location by paragraph.

This is not what matters. Surface is secondary.

The ditch digging, the setting of steel, the pouring of concrete for the foundation of the future book. This is what requires our efforts.

Clearly defined scope of these systems, clearly defined open protocols. These are what require our discussion.

Tools with simple, quiet, clean interfacesorganically surfacing our changing relationship with text. These are what we need to build.

All of these efforts combined, these systems integrated, these tools made well and deliberately. This is the future book. Our platform for post-artifact books and publishing.