Shimenawa

What is not happening (in publishing)

[Warning: This is a long post.]

I was speaking with a researcher pulling together data on the development of digital books and the IDPF, and I found myself discoursing about the larger organizational responses that publishers are, or are not, invoking in response to revolutionary changes in media. The post is specifically motivated by the observation that some strategies common to other organizational fields under competitive threat are not being widely implemented among large trade publishing firms.

I have a particular interest in this topic; my doctoral research (never culminated in a degree) focused on the adoption of biotechnology – a new way of doing product development, through new forms of science and engineering – by established biopharmaceuticals.

Broadly speaking, a large biopharm company has a limited number of ways to adapt to a R&D environment in which new products can be developed in a fundamentally new way, via genetic engineering versus chemical discovery. It is useful to compare biopharm’s strategic options to those embraced by the NYC based trade publishing industry, which is confronting the explosion of possibilities for new generation publishing and distribution made available by network technologies.

Publishing, in many ways, is arguably more complex a case than biotech because the innovations are more diffused and are associated with widely disparate competencies; it is not merely a case of molecular biology contra chemistry. New forms of engagement with social media; struggles to foresee attractive device engineering strategies; models for mobile consumption; changes in book packaging, particularly toward network based access; migrations from traditional physical to network based design paradigms; new models of remuneration; the challenges of an increasingly flat, complex, and global rights world; and the escalation of traditional factor costs all impose severe constraints on traditional publishing’s ability to rapidly innovate.

Here are some options:

1). Get the religion, and reinvent your company. This is grossly difficult, and arguably not done in biopharm. There are several reasons, and one of them is that older forms of drug discovery and development still have some value, so throwing out the baby is not a good choice. However, more importantly, a very large company is not well positioned to undertake the wrenching changes necessary in strategy reformulation and organizational restructuring to go native; additionally, and equally as importantly, a phoenix company will need to wholly re-structure its world of network ties to external firms: suppliers, customers to some extent, and developers. In biotech, a suddenly critical resource was the strength and extant of ties to fundamental science researchers in molecular and genetic biology, versus chemistry. This is not the kind of network redesign that happens overnight. In fact, because of career advancement patterns, it usually does not happen.

In publishing, I just do not see this happening anywhere. No publisher has looked at the precipice and said, “Yep, that’s not good, we’re heading for a new high ground.” Instead they have valued their existing baby – traditional models of publishing – very highly. In an odd but direct sense, this can be reflected in the AAP’s embrace of the Google Book Search settlement proposal, which is a profoundly conservative method of maintaining the existing book business, off loading some innovation in distribution, but not touching the essence of the product – the book – itself. (It also has some characteristics of an alliance strategy, discussed below). At any rate, I do not believe we are likely to see a large, established publishing company transform itself into a technology focused innovator.

2) Birthing the beast within. In biotech, some large companies tried desperately to create an entrepreneurial atmosphere within their companies, setting up quasi-independent units to undertake biotech style research and drug discovery; encouraging their scientists to form new relationships with university science departments, and allowing them to operate with relative freedom, including the opportunity to establish new alliances with external biotech firms without the traditional review triage.

Success has been slow, at least at the fundamental task at creating a beach-hold from which the new way of doing science and business might establish itself as a rapid and healthy alternative within the established company. Again, there are many reasons for this: a reluctance to surrender resources in environments constrained by external factors and threats; resource envy over the targeting of a select group for streamlined operation and concomitant higher risk innovation; the extraordinary difficulty of establishing communication, much less practice-sharing, with the mother-ship; and the pragmatic likelihood that the individuals placed in such units are already part of professional networks that are “outside” the industry, and are thus more likely to find attractive employment elsewhere.

Some publishing outfits are attempting to implement this strategy. Harper Studio is exemplary; there are a few others. I find Tor’s pan-sci/fi portal site to be a bold step in a future-forward direction, although Tor is specifically focused on user (web) transactions versus more polygamous engagements with data (for example, by developing enhancements that facilitate linked data and integration with off-site network resources).

I frankly cannot afford these much assurance of success, except for very limited purposes. Most of these efforts fail to deliver their original vision for the host organization, even if they are locally successful within their units, for a simple reason: they grossly underestimate the extent of the revolution occurring outside the doors of their house.

3. Allying oneself with transformative companies. This has been a very common strategy for biopharm; it does not invoke painful internal change, and it allows one to suck off some of the benefits of innovation elsewhere. However, it conversely does not reinvent your firm, and it creates resource dependencies that can debilitate over time. Alliances are fragile, and the costs of out-of-firm maintenance can suddenly emerge as a threatening constraint. This strategy generally pulls out the survival curve but does not alter its direction.

Publishing has done some of this, usually with firms that engage in new forms of content distribution, e.g., in mobile platform. This is a conservative approach, and one already established in publishing by historical patterns of off-loading technology development to digital conversion hotels and content repositories. Adequate internal expertise has to be developed to successfully interface with more specialized staff in external firms, but these units, and the individuals within them, can often be “bolted on” to existing firm divisions such as “digital media” or “acquisitions” or “marketing” without massive disruptions. Random’s engagement with gaming firms is a wonderful example of the short term success that can come with this strategy.

As I mentioned previously, in some form, the GBS settlement can be seen as a limited, non-transformative alliance between an innovation purveyor and traditional industrial firms. It is limited to an innovation sector in discovery and distribution, and the most attractive innovation, in data and related integration services, is not shared beyond Google, and indeed not adequately perceived by publishing as a longer term strategic necessity. This characterizes one great shortfall of this approach: it is often narrowly focused on innovative forms that occur on well-marked edges of existing firm processes instead of the hazy, shadowy borders of greater risk and return; alliances focus on incremental versus revolutionary embrace.

4. Acquisition. It is always easier for significant revolutions in production, distribution, and product design to emerge wholly apart from existing industry. The resource inputs are either dramatically different, or distinctly sourced; development processes require different input skills that are more prevalent in unfamiliar professional networks; the organizational field of collaborators, and the type and nature of resource dependencies often resides on an entirely different vector to the established sector. Indeed, a hallmark of transformative eras is that the most market-disruptive firms are often entirely blind to the existing industry, or at least not reliant on its continued existence. Arguably, e.g., craiglist could give a shit if newspapers folded; from their perspective, that is not a location for competitive friction. Facebook might be; Hearst Media is not.

For these reasons, one of the most prevalent strategies of established biopharm firms under threat from biotech is to acquire these competencies, or alternatively make significant equity investments in them; in the case of acquisitions, usually “parking” them to the side of the existing core organizational structure. This protects the innovator’s ecology, and shields the larger organization from disruption, while lowering the risks of external alliance collaboration and resource dependency. Roche (+) Genentech, and the various share-wars that have erupted between those two firms, is an interesting case in point. (Indeed, as Genentech’s fortunes have stabilized, it has thrown increasingly stronger ripostes to Roche’s efforts at incremental consolidation).

This is not happening to any significant degree in trade publishing. That is striking to me. It speaks, potentially, to a greater breadth of transformation in media, compared to drug development. Biopharm and biotech both had to make accommodation to the identical set of ultimate customers, physicians and hospitals; both were reviewed and regulated (albeit in different fashion) by similar government processes, generally by the same agency. One could argue that the transformation confronting most legacy media companies is more encompassing. In fact, instead of these changes becoming more tractable over time, reflecting the same conundrums from music to books, it might be that they are becoming more intractable as the pace of external innovation accelerates.

Harper did not acquire Lexcycle; Amazon did. If I had to conservatively predict an acquirer for Scribd, it would be Google, Amazon or Microsoft, not Random House. That is a particularly telling commentary, and I think it argues for an unhealthy and fulsome separation between traditional publishing and the locus of innovation boiling up on the edges of the traditional publishing industry.

In sum. Revolutions in industry are times of both great creativity and disruption. It is intriguing to witness the development of responsive strategies by existing firms, as they learn to recognize external threats to their business model, emerging from larger social, scientific, economic, and/or political changes. So far, as indicated in this very informal analysis, I would suggest that publishing has only anemically adapted to an altered landscape, and the consequences could be very troubling for existing firms.

Those files go the way that files do

At Book Expo America’s recent conference in New York (May 29-30 2009), my publishing business colleague, Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch, conducted an interview with publishing executives focused on the Google Book Search (GBS) settlement:

[A]t the invitation of the AAP and Google I moderated a panel discussion with John Sargent from Macmillan and Richard Sarnoff from Bertelsmann that had the … goal of illuminating for publishers some of the basics of the proposed settlement of the Google Book Search lawsuits. The session was strictly limited to publishers only … .

Both Sargent and Sarnoff were extensively involved in the negotiations of the Google Book Search settlement, and the interview is revealing for the attitudes of the large trade publishers who negotiated the proposed agreement with Google. The attitudes expressed toward libraries, e.g., while sadly not atypical of NY publishers, are striking to those of us who care about the public services that libraries provide.

Cader’s post on the discussion is long; I’ve merely excerpted portions below, attempting to retain the parts most newsworthy. The report originally appeared in Publisher’s Lunch Deluxe, Michael’s superb subscription based news service for the publishing industry. Although little known outside of publishing, I would encourage anyone following publishing and its transformations to subscribe to the free Lunch, and consider the paid version.

Following are some of the highlights of Cader’s reportage. Clarifications in [...] are Cader’s.

Sargent’s opening statement addressed head-on the question of what will happen if the settlement is not approved by the judge. “We will proceed to have litigation for a long time period, perhaps up to five years, during which Google will continue to scan and libraries will continue” to use files in ways that publishers might not like. “The libraries then get to do what they want to do with the scans” and since the law does not allow obtaining monetary awards from state institutions, “there’s a very real danger those files go the way that files do.” … Google’s Tom Turvey agreed with Sargent’s assessment that scanning (and litigation) would proceed in the absence of an approved agreement.

Among the many advantages of the settlement that Sargent forsees are “an agreement that IP is something to be paid for when it is dispersed” and “a way to control those scans [as they are given back to libraries] that is clearly defined.”

Speaking to concerns about Google’s apparently exclusive franchise over orphan works–whatever body that winds up constituting after books are claimed–Sargent acknowledged that “in a plain fact they have a lot of power over those works,” but “anybody has the right to follow in Google’s footsteps if so desired.” Both men anticipate that the financial incentives will lead to the claiming of many works. “If checks start to go out,” Sargent said, “everybody will be claiming.”

Though foreign publishers have objected to what appears to be sweeping authority from the US over their books, Sargent noted that “the advantage…is that you get protection on your works” that would not exist without the settlement.

…

A concern from abroad has been the lack of international representation on the board of the Book Rights Registry, even though works in foreign language have been estimated in the past to potentially comprise half of all the material in academic libraries. Here Sargent disclosed that “we are looking at a two-tier structure for the registry board” and said “we do expect to satisy the concerns of foreign publishers for representation.” He added that they “realize there are lot of constituents that need a voice,” also including an array of scholarly and educational publishers.

Sarnoff would not speak to the revenue that they estimate would be generated from institutional subscriptions under the settlement agreement. But he noted that “just by the level of concern” over potential pricing it’s clear “the library community feels that this product will be enormously attractive.” On the contrary concern–that pricing might not be competitive and that agreements with parties other than Google might not emerge, Sargent noted, “think of all the players who would like to use some of these books now.”

Legislation and Litigation: Vanderbilt News and Google

In the Spring of 1971, a novel screening of recorded TV footage was held in the Senate Office Building at the request of the Republican National Committee. That congressional screening, and a few others that were conducted later, inaugurated a set of events that ultimately contributed to one of the most significant rewritings of copyright legislation in the last 50 years (the 1976 Act), and the development of important Section 108 exceptions for libraries and archives.

The screening of videotaped recordings from major TV broadcast news stations on the U.S. government supported Laos incursions by South Vietnam’s Army was compiled and produced by a then little-known initiative housed at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee called the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (VTNA).

VTNA’s story began in 1968, when its founder, Paul Simpson, began the systematic recording of the three major U.S. television networks through their local affiliates. Uninterrupted to the current day, VTNA continues to record, collect, index, and make available national news broadcasts, preserving them in a unique collection available via a lending program to anyone in the country, merely at the cost of duplication or recording onto DVDs.

Within a few years of its founding, VTNA would wind up enmeshed in a skein of litigation and legislation. Yet, VTNA’s valiant efforts to protect public access yields an accidental and instructive example for how positive legislative outcomes can emerge in a fight against attempts to leverage court rulings benefiting private parties, side-stepping Congressional engagement.

At the Internet Archive, we believe there is an opportunity for a similar and critical analogue to emerge out of the proposed class action settlement in the Authors Guild, et al v. Google case placed before the SDNY District Court concerning Google Book Search.

History Lessons

The utility of the VTNA’s recording of TV news — and in the eyes of conservative government representatives and the Nixon White House, capturing the alleged liberal biases of the New York media — was apparent even before the landmark 1971 screening. VTNA attracted several attempts to legislatively enshrine protections for its activities, ultimately inspiring two discrete bills that wound up incorporated into the later 1976 Copyright Act: a mandate for a national broadcast archive and an exemption from liability against infringement for libraries and archives recording broadcast content.

In an important new work on the history of home video, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, Lucas Hilderbrand discusses the impact of new technology on interpretations of rights, piracy, and property. Hilderbrand includes an entire chapter on the history of VTNA’s stressful journey along the parallel tracks of litigation and legislation, observing that “Copyright became the means of both challenging and ultimately ensuring public access to television records.” (N.B.: I am working from pre-publication galleys generously provided by the author, and used here with his permission).

Contemplating VTNA’s founding in the late 1960s, Hilderbrand comments: “Thus nearly a decade before fair use (Section 107 of the copyright act) would provide the basis of the Supreme Court’s ruling that off-air recordings for private use must be permitted, off-air videotaping directly shaped legislation of the exemptions for libraries and archives. Although distinct from Section 107, Section 108 can be seen as the logical, institutional extension of fair use.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, CBS News, the most watched, revered, and influential news broadcast in the U.S., kept its own semi-public (restricted access) archive. CBS believed that VTNA was recording and collecting news broadcasts without permission or license. After several attempts to force VTNA to license its own recordings, CBS sued the archive for copyright infringement in 1973, alleging that the archive re-edited and leased its broadcasts to users, appropriating its content.

CBS maintained that a private solution was the best approach for broadcast news access; the situation did not require intrusive legislative action. As late as Congressional hearings in 1975 on the draft revisions to the copyright law, CBS vice president and general counsel Robert Evans testified, “Moreover, the problem addressed by these unusual provisions is not one that requires Congressional action because it is being resolved by private initiative.” Of course, as Hilderbrand notes, the private initiative that CBS advocated was the network’s, not the VTNA’s. Hilderbrand comments further:

Despite CBS’ efforts to establish television news collections through [its own] public archives, Vanderbilt maintained that its operations were essential to democratize user access to the tapes and to maintain the availability of the other networks’ news programs. Despite being a private university, Vanderbilt refused to cloister tapes in the ivory tower and adamantly supported the broadest feasible scenario for public access.

After a few modifications to the proposed copyright legislation before Congress, and a reconciliation in which the Senate accepted several House modifications (including in Sections 107 and 108), President Ford signed the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 into law on October 19. In early December, CBS requested the dismissal of the lawsuit without prejudice, and the court officially dissolved the case on December 20, 1976.

Google Book Search

Today, in a case with some striking similarities, Google, the AAP, and the AG hope to rewrite copyright through a private, judicially approved agreement. As Marybeth Peters, the U.S. Registrar of Copyright, observed at the Columbia Law conference on the settlement, “The question is: When you have a private agreement, where there are private solutions, that are in the nature of legislative action … is this a good thing?” Ms. Peters also quoted Robert Clarida, then Chair, Committee on Copyright and Literary Property for the NYC Bar as stating, “The settlement in effect provides a privately legislated set of rules governing relations between an entire copyright industry and the world’s largest search engine”.

Orphan works legislation almost passed in the last session of Congress. It could pass in this session. As the Justice Department begins an inquiry into the settlement, we have an opportunity to consider anew the proper wisdom of a legislative cure for a problem that Google originally attempted to address in 2004: providing the greatest possible access to out of print books that are potentially in-copyright. Unfortunately, that initial effort has turned into a radically reshaped proposal: a court-approved monopoly for Google, and a bad deal for authors and publishers.

The complex issues of rights registries, access to orphan works, elaborating fair use in a digital age, and maintaining international compliance should be the province of public discussion. The goals of Vanderbilt’s archive — “the broadest feasible scenario for public access” — must be the primary consideration that drives a public and legislative solution, instead of a privately negotiated settlement for the benefit on a single corporation currently under investigation for antitrust.

At the Columbia conference, Google’s chief counsel for the Book Search project, Alex Macgillivray, loudly noted Google’s staunch support for orphan works legislation. Well, now is the time. Let’s halt the push for a court approved, private settlement that gives Google a monopoly on the largest digital library of books in the world. Instead, let’s launch a considered investigation of what the nation deserves, in a dialogue that is open and inclusive of all the sectors of our country that have a stake in defining the 21st Century of books, and the rights of readers.

ALA has questions for Google

The ALA office reports that Google has been calling members, seeking 1-1 appointments to discuss the Google Book Search settlement. Once again Google goes individually to libraries, seeking to reassure. The ALA suggests that if a library does meet with Google, it ask some hard questions, and try to get some answers beyond verbal assurances.

Since I have many Google friends, I am inviting them to respond here to these questions from the ALA, which I am reproducing below.

On the topic of equitable access to information, and more specifically pricing, the proposed settlement allows for differential pricing for different categories of institutions for subscriptions, why? The settlement states institutional subscription pricing will be “based on comparable products and services.” Since no other comparable product or service currently exists, how will Google keep from disparities in access to its product if subscription prices are, or become, too expensive? Finally, the Book Rights Registry established by the proposed settlement (and comprised of equal numbers of representatives for the authors and publishers), has been granted the oversight to settle disputes over pricing. What, if any, mechanism would be available to libraries (as primary customers of the product), and individual consumers to dispute pricing?

With respect to patron privacy — what assurances, aside from a verbal commitment, does the library community, library patrons and the public interest have that their privacy rights will be protected? The proposed settlement itself is silent on the topic of patron privacy rights, why? Were the three private entities unable to reach agreement, in their closed deliberations, on a privacy policy?

Finally, with regard to intellectual freedom, the proposed settlement allows Google to omit up to 15% of in-copyright, not commercially available books it has scanned from libraries. What criteria will Google use to determine which books are omitted from the product? Will Google identify the books omitted and provide any explanation as to why? How will Google keep from engaging in censorship as it is conceivable and even likely that both domestic and international pressure will be exerted upon them to censor books?

Hopefully, Google will provide answers to these questions. Of course, there are many more than these.

Keeping the data open

Something that I hadn’t previously considered for the proposed Books Rights Registry (BRR) in the Google Book Search settlement was the role that it might play in imposing data manipulations and metadata enrichment, and then subsequently allocating their costs — whether real or transactional — among subscribers, consumers, and other participants (including authors and publishers).

For example, theoretically, the BRR has the ability to impose ISBNs and other identifiers on orphan works that lack them. ISBNs could be provided in a special grant by EDItEUR for this purpose, with the costs apportioned among rightsholders and consumers.

Some of these data manipulations would be considered useful enhancements, but there also exists the possibility that they could be enacted without adequately broad engagement or consideration of the data flow and management issues among publishers, libraries, and consumers, particularly as they evolve into the future. A related risk is that non-traditional, but potentially higher-return options, might not be endorsed. It makes the necessity for coordinating stakeholders in metadata issues among all of these communities increasingly critical.

There is currently no mechanism in the BRR for community coordination to be imposed. There is mention in the settlement only of an advisory board, but not only has it not been named, it currently has no power of compulsion. I believe there is a default to good-will in this area, but it would be better for conversations among parties to be coordinated openly.

Additionally, these concerns strongly agitate for the continued maintenance and availability of open data for bibliographic and rights data, such as the Internet Archive’s Open Library (OL). Although OL has been poorly accessible through APIs, the necessity of encouraging the unimpeded flow of descriptive data without use restrictions is vital for maximizing the continued evolution of books and publishing, and our understanding of how and what we read. In conjunction with the OL, ensuring the availability of all known rights attributes associated with an object, particularly as a package, will be requisite. These data should be accessible in XML for easy machine consumption, and not provided only through user driven search interfaces.

One of the worries of the settlement is that there are a great many potential new sources of leverage and engagement that could leave even current stakeholders in the agreement uncomfortable with the consequences.

What about the dissertations?

As people consider the Google Book Search settlement proposal in increasing depth, more and more questions seem to crop up. Some of them do not have simple answers. Today, a colleague from a law school asked me whether dissertations would be considered as “Books” under the terms of the settlement. Good question.

I am most definitely not an expert on dissertations: I’ve always shied as far away as possible from discussions relating to ETD programs. In the context of the settlement, their presence had not really occurred to me. As someone suggested, this is probably just one of hundreds of cases of some consequence that were never explicitly thought about.

So what about dissertations? Are they covered under the settlement? The answer might be “yes” — at least, much of the time. Let’s turn quickly to the “Book” definition in the Settlement, §1.16:

“Book” means a written or printed work that (a) if a “United States work,” as defined in 17 U.S.C. § 101, has been registered with the United States Copyright Office as of the Notice Commencement Date, (b) on or before the Notice Commencement Date, was published or distributed to the public or made available for public access as a set of written or printed sheets of paper bound together in hard copy form under the authorization of the work’s U.S. copyright owner, and (c) as of the Notice Commencement Date, is subject to a Copyright Interest.

The quick consensus from those that I asked is that dissertations are usually considered “publications”, particularly if one assumes that UMI services satisfy the condition of public distribution. Proquest states:

ProQuest UMI Dissertation Publishing has been publishing dissertations and theses since 1938. In that time, we have published over 2 million graduate works from graduate schools around the world. We have over 700 active university publishing partners, and publish more than 70,000 new graduate works each year.

A 2000 CNI taskforce update [PDF] by the Library of Congress, discussing digital deposit of dissertations, observes:

Each year, UMI Dissertations Publishing receives over 40,000 U.S. Ph.D. dissertations and Masters’ theses for publication. As part of its services, UMI provides copyright registration through the U.S. Copyright Office for those authors desiring registration. An average of 17,000 to 20,000 authors take advantage of this service each year, making UMI the largest single contributor of copyright registration applications to the U.S. Copyright Office.

Registration is not necessary to secure copyright, but it does offer certain protections; in the settlement context, it is required to meet the definition of “Book”. Regardless of the initial registration, one would expect that at least those published up until 1963 are Public Domain (with no subsequent renewal of copyright), but they would have to be claimed as such by Google as Public Domain Works (See §3.1 Identification, Digitization and Use of Books. “Google shall identify to the Registry books that it has determined to be Public Domain Books pursuant to the process set forth in Attachment E (Public Domain) and for which Google wants the safe harbor described in Section 3.2(d)(v)(3) (Safe Harbor). For each such book, Google shall provide the supporting reasons and information that Attachment E (Public Domain) requires.”)

Some additional number of these dissertations may simply not be available (they might be withheld from public consultation for a variety of reasons). One would not necessarily know that by looking at thesis documentation, but they would not be part of the settlement presumably.

One also has to wonder if dissertations are “Commercially Available”. Those that are available through print on demand only, might not be so classified. (See §4.7 New Revenue Models. “POD copies of Books distributed by third parties. A Book’s availability through such POD program would not, in and of itself, result in the Book being classified as Commercially Available.”). However, many dissertations are available through the licensed Dissertation Abstracts service, but Google would have no way of knowing a priori which dissertations were available, unless they subscribed to the service.

There are probably many other convolutions, but I must turn to my readers for help and clarification.

Tags: copyright, dissertations, Google Book Search, Publishing

Learning to ride a bike

Recently, my ebook colleague Martyn Daniels blogged about Random House’s experiments in mixed media books, “… Explodes the Digital Spine.”

The Random House Group has launched its first list of ‘enhanced’ ebooks. ‘Book and Beyond’ is aimed at extending the content past the text that was in the print work and truly exploding the spine. Readers can now enjoy additional content such as videos, games, quizzes, photos, author interviews, interactive graphics and the option to listen to or read the text at the start of each chapter.

This made me think about my 7 year old daughter, who is learning to ride a bike. We had started last year, in the summer and Fall, but held off during the rainy winter. She had been doing alright, slowly acquiring a sense of balance, momentum, speed, and space. It needed more work.

With my own switch of employment to the Internet Archive, I recently purchased a folding bike so I could take BART into the city, and then bike around the Marina to the Presidio. That’s the plan, anyway. But it also gave me an excuse to go out again with my daughter to our local public school playground, so I could teach her new and important skills like how to start off on her bike, by herself.

It was truly as if the world had made a complete circuit. The balance was there, with more assertiveness, and all of a sudden, on our first ride this summer, it so obviously all came together for her. Definitely not perfect, but it’s undeniably there. And yea, she learned to push off. Now comes the hard part: learning all about city traffic and street signs. I’ll be taking my time on those lessons.

So when my friend Mike Shatzkin recently noted that the EPUB format wasn’t low-touch because it did not reflow around charts and illustrations well — I thought about how people learn to ride bikes. Mike said:

Epub can “reflow” text, making adjustments for screen size. But there is no way to do for that for illustrations or many charts or graphs without human intervention (for a long while, at least.) Even if you could program so that art would automatically resize for the screen size, you wouldn’t know whether the art would look any good or be legible in the different size. A human would have to look and be sure.

This comment made me realize the huge gulf in how I see the book world, and how publishing sees the book world. Because we’ll be writing differently. And we already are. We won’t be writing for paper, we’ll be writing for interactions.

And with that change, is coming a whole change in infrastructure that supports communication: duplication, distribution, performance. Our understanding of digital rights.

My friend Joe Esposito, in email, was quick to note that in fact this is already happening to a huge degree in STM publishing. The premise is that links and datasets are live; analyses are replicated in-page; molecules are spun; and perhaps in the near future through devices such as the iPhone and Android, even the atomic repulsion is sensed. The skein of linked data is being knit, article by article, text by text, data by data, feeling by feeling, and the presumption of where and on what device the work is encountered is ebbing transparently into the background, an inconsequence of design.

Today, authoring multimedia fictional or non-technical non-fiction treatises is craft work, but the tools are not simply growing, they are being woven together as well, building a new infrastructure for creativity that will, in turn, re-write our understanding of books — of sharing information. As I sit in a hotel room and write this, my blogging software supports automatic inclusion of media; it’s not hard … and yet my ability to endorse, to enable, my software’s tenacious grasp at other information on the web, seeking my permission for its inclusion here, implicitly or explicitly, will soon be part of my menu bar as well. The world gets smaller; communication is more social, more ubiquitous.

Writing the new book is something we won’t be thinking about soon. It won’t be craft, forcing us to knit together mixed media. It will be transmedia. It will be a skill, like using a phone. Like riding a bike.

Not everyone will have that skill, but most will. Not everyone will have access to the tools, but many will. And that will be the way of it. And I think that will be the way of it, very soon.