"Free" can help a book do its job

(Note: I wrote this article for NZCommons, based on my presentation at the 2015 PSP Annual Conference in February.)

Every book has a job to do. For many books, that job is to make money for its creators. But a lot of books have other jobs to do. Sometimes the fact that people pay for books helps that job, but other times the book would be able to do its job better if it was free for everyone.

That's why Creative Commons licensing is so important. But while CC addresses the licensing problem nicely, free ebooks face many challenges that make it difficult for them to do their jobs.

Let's look at some examples.

When Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, its number one job was to earn tenure for the author, a rising academic. It succeeded, and then some. The book became a classic, elevating an obscure topic and creating an entire field of scholarly inquiry in cultural anthropology. But in 2012, it was failing to do any job at all. The book was out of print and unavailable to young scholars on the very continent whose culture it documented. Ruth Finnegan, the author, considered it her life's work and hoped it would continue to stimulate original research and new insights. To accomplish that, the book needed to be free. It needed to be translatable, it needed to be extendable.


Nga Reanga Youth Development: Maori Styles, an Open Access book by Josie Keelan, is another example of an academic book with important jobs to do. While its primary job is a local one, the advancement of understanding and practice in Maori youth development, it has another job, a global one. Being free helps it speak to scholars and researchers around the world.

Leanne Brown's Good and Cheap is a very different book. It's a cookbook. But the job she wanted it to do made it more than your usual cookbook. She wanted to improve the lives of people who receive "nutrition assistance"- food stamps, by providing recipes for nutritious and healthy meals that can be made without spending much money. By being free, Good and Cheap helps more people in need eat well.

My last example is Casey Fiesler's Barbie™ I Can Be A Computer Engineer The Remix! Now With Less Sexism! The job of this book is to poke fun at the original Barbie™ I Can Be A Computer Engineer, in which Barbie needs boys to do the actual computer coding. But because Fiesler uses material from the original under "fair use", anything other than free, non-commercial distribution isn't legal. Barbie, remixed can ONLY be a free ebook.

But there's a problem with free ebooks. The book industry runs on a highly evolved and optimized cradle-to-grave supply chain, comprising publishers, printers, production houses, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, aggregators, libraries, publicists, developers, cataloguers, database suppliers, reviewers, used-book dealers, even pulpers. And each entity in this supply chain takes its percentage. The entire chain stops functioning when an ebook is free. Even libraries (most of them) lack the processes that would enable them to include free ebooks in their collections.

At Unglue.it, we ran smack into this problem when we set out to bring books into the creative commons. We helped Open Book Publishers crowd fund a new ebook edition of Oral Literature in Africa. The ebook was then freely available, but it wasn't easy to make it free on Amazon, which dominates the ebook market. We couldn't get the big ebook aggregators that serve libraries to add it to their platforms. We realized that someone had to do the work that the supply chain didn't want to do.

Over the past year, we've worked to turn Unglue.it into a "bookstore for free books". The transformation isn't done yet, but we've built a database of over 1200 downloadable ebooks, licensed under Creative Commons or other free licenses. We have a long way to go, but we're distributing over 10,000 ebooks per month. We're providing syndication feeds, developing relationships with distributors, improving metadata, and promoting wonderful books that happen to be free.

The creators of these books still need to find support. To help them, we've developed three revenue programs. For books that already have free licenses, we help the creators ask for financial support in the one place where readers are most appreciative of their work- inside the books themselves. We call this "thanks for ungluing".

For books that exist as ebooks but need to recoup production costs, we offer "buy-to-unglue". We'll sell these books until they reach a revenue target, after which they'll become open access. For books that exist in print but need funding for conversion to open access ebook, we offer "pledge-to-unglue", which is a way of crowd-funding the conversion.

After a book has finished its job, it can look forward to a lengthy retirement. There's no need for books to die anymore, but we can help them enjoy retirement, and maybe even enjoy a second life. Project Gutenberg has over 50,000 books that have "retired" into the public domain. We're starting to think about the care these books need. Formats change along with the people that use them, and the book industry's supply chain does its best to turn them back into money-earners to pay for that care.

Recently we received a grant from the Knight Foundation to work on ways to provide the long-term care that these books need to be productive AND free in their retirements. GITenberg, a collaboration between the folks at Unglue.it and ebook technologist Seth Woodward is exploring the use of Github for free ebook maintenance. Github is a website that supports collaborative software development with source control and workflow tools. Our hope is that the ingredients that have made Github wildly successful in the open source software world will will prove to by similarly effective in supporting ebooks.

It wasn't so long ago that printing costs made free ebooks impossible. So it's no wonder that free ebooks haven't realized their full potential. But with cooperation and collaboration, we can really make wonderful things happen.

Why GitHub is Important for Book Publishing

How do you organize large numbers of people for a common purpose? For millenia, the answer has been some sort of hierarchical organization. An army, or a feudal system topped with a king. To reach global scale, these hierarchies propagated customs and codes for behavior: laws, religions, ideology. Most of what you read in history books is really the history of these hierarchies. It wasn't possible to orchestrate big efforts or harness significant resources any other way.

In the 20th century, mass media redistributed much of this organizational power. In politics, charismatic individuals could motivate millions of people independently of the hierarchies that maintain command and control. But for the most part, one hierarchy got swapped for another. In business, production innovations such as Henry Ford's assembly line needed the hierarchy to support the capital investments.

I think the history of the 21st century will be the story of non-hierarchical systems of human organization enabled by the Internet. From this point of view, Wikipedia is particularly important not only for its organization of knowledge, but because it demonstrated that thousands of people can be organized with extremely small amounts of hierarchy. Anyone can contribute, anyone can edit, and many do. Bitcoin, or whatever cryptocurrency wins out, won't be successful because of a hierarchy but rather because of a framework of incentives for a self-interested network of entities to work together. Crowdfunding will enable resources to coalesce around needs without large hierarchical foundations or financial institutions.

So let's think a bit about book publishing. Through the 20th century, publishing required a signification amount of investment in capital- printing presses, warehouses, delivery trucks, bookstores, libraries, and people with specialized skills and abilities. A few large publishing companies emerged along with big-box retailers that together comprised an efficient machine for producing, distributing and monetizing books of all kinds. The transition from print to digital has eliminated need for the physical aspects of the book publishing machine, but the human components of that machine remain essential. It's no longer clear that the hierarchical organization of publishing is necessary for the organization of publishing's human effort.

I've already mentioned Wikipedia's conquest of encyclopedia publishing, by dint of its large scale and wide reach. But equally important to its success has been a set of codes and customs bound together in a suite of collaboration and workflow tools. Version tracking allows for easy reversion of edits. "Talk pages" and notifications facilitate communication and collaboration. (And edit-wars and page locking, but that's another bucket of fish.)

Most publishing projects have audiences that are too small or requirements too specific to support Wikipedia's anyone-can-edit-or-revert model of collaboration. A more appropriate model for collaboration in publishing  is one widely used for software development.

Modern software development requires people with different skills to work together. Book publishing is the same. Designers, engineers, testers, product managers, writers, and subject domain experts may each have an important role in creating a software application; authors, editors, proofreaders, illustrators, designers, subject experts, agents, and publicists may all work together on a book. Book publishing and software can be either open or proprietary. The team producing a book or a piece of software might number from one to a hundred. Books and programs can go into maintenance mode or be revised in new editions or versions. Translation into new languages happens for both. Assets from one project can be reused in other projects.

Open source software has been hugely successful over the past few decades. Along the way, an ecosystem of collaboration tools and practices has evolved to support both open source development and software development in general. Many aspects of this ecosystem have been captured in GitHub.

The "Git" in GitHub comes from git, an open source distributed version control system initially written by Linus Torvalds, the Linus behind Linux. It's fast, and it lets you work on a local code repository and then merge your changes with a repository stored somewhere else.

In just two sentences, I've touched on several concepts that may be foreign to many book publishing professionals. Microsoft Word's "track changes" is probably the closest that most authors get to a version control system. The big difference is that "track changes" is designed to facilitate collaboration between a maximum of two people. Git works easily with many contributors. A code "repository" holds more than just code, it can contain all the assets, documentation, and licenses associated with a project. And unlike "track changes", Git remembers the entire history of your project. Many book publishers still don't keep together all the assets that go into a book. And I'm guessing that publishers are still working on centralizing their asset stores instead of distributing them!

Git is just one of the useful aspects of GitHub. I think the workflow tools are perhaps more important. Developers talk about the workflow variants such as "git-flow" and "GitHub-flow", but the differences are immaterial to this discussion. Here's what it boils down to: Someone working on a project will first create a "feature branch", a copy of the repository that adds a feature or fixes a bug. When the new feature has been tested and is working, the changes will be "committed". Each set of changes is given an identifier and a message explaining what has been changed. The branch's developer then sends a "pull request" to the maintainers of the repository. A well crafted pull request will provide tests and documentation for the new feature. If the maintainers like the changes, they "pull" the changes into the main branch of the repository. Each of these steps is a push of a button on GitHub, and GitHub provides annotation, visualization and commenting tools that support discussions around each pull request, as well as issue lists and wiki pages.

The reason the workflow tools and the customs surrounding their use are so important is that anyone who has used them already knows how to participate in another project. For an excellent non-programming example, take a look at the free-programming-books repository, which is a basic list of programming books available online for free.  As of today, 512 different different people have contributed a total of 2,854 sets of changes the the repository, have expanded it to books in 23 languages, and have added free courses, screencasts and interactive tutorials. The maintainers enforce some basic standards and make sure that the list is free of pirated books and the like.

It's also interesting that there are 7,229 "forks" of free-programming-books. Each of these could be different. If the main free-programming-books repo disappears, or if the maintainers go AWOL, one of these forks could become the main fork. Or if one group of contributors want to move the project in a different direction from the maintainers, it's easy to do.

Forking a book is a lot more common than you might think. Consider the book Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. OCLC's WorldCat lists 7,459 editions of this book, each one representing significantly more effort than a button push in a workflow system. It's common to have many editions of out-of-copyright books of course, but it's also becoming common for books developed with open processes. As an example, look at the repository for Amy Brown and Greg Wilson's Architecture of Open Source Applications.  It has 5 contributors, and has been forked 58 times. For another example of using GitHub to write a book, read Scott Chacon's description of how he produced the second edition of Pro Git. (Are you surprised that a founder of GitHub is using GitHub to revise his book about Git?)

There's another aspect of modern software engineering with GitHub support that could be very useful for book publishing and distribution. "Continuous integration" is essential for development of complex software systems because changes in one component can have unintended effects on other components. For that reason, when a set of changes is committed to a project, the entire project needs to be rebuilt and retested. GitHub supports this via "hooks". For example, a "post-commit" hook can trigger a build-test apparatus; hooks can even be used to automatically deploy the new software version into production environments. In the making of a book, the insertion of a sentence might necessitate re-pagination and re-indexing. With continuous integration, you can imagine the correction of a typo immediately resulting in changes in all the copies of a textbook for sale. (or even the copies that had already been purchased!)

A number of startups have recognized the applicability of Git and GitHub to book publishing. Leanpub, GitBook, and Penflip are supporting GitHub backends for open publishing models; so far adoption has been most rapid in author communities that already "get" GitHub, for example, software developers. The company that is best able to teach a GitHub-like toolset to non-programmers will have a good and worthy business, I think.

As more people learn and exercise the collaboration culture of GitHub, new things will become possible. Last year, I became annoyed that I couldn't fix a problem I found with an ebook from Project Gutenberg. It seemed obvious to me that I should put my contributions into a GitHub repo so that others could easily make use of my work. I created a GitHub organization for "Project GitenHub". In the course of creating my third GitenHub book, I discovered that someone named Seth Woodward had done the same thing a year before me, and he had moved over a thousand Project Gutenberg texts onto GitHub, in the "GITenberg"  organization. Since I knew how to contribute to a GitHub project, I knew that I could start sending pull requests to GITenberg to add my changes to its repositories. And so Seth and I started working together on GITenberg.

Seth has now loaded over 50,000 books from Project Gutenberg onto GitHub. (The folks at Project Gutenberg are happy to see this happening, by the way.) Seth and I are planning out how to make improved quality ebooks and metadata for all of these books, which would be impossible without a way to get people to work together. We put in a funding proposal to the Knight Foundation's NewsChallenge competition. And we were excited to learn that (as of Jan 1, 2015) the Text Creation Partnership has added 25,000 texts from EEBO (Early English Books Online) on GitHub. So it's an exciting time for books on GitHub.

There's quite a bit of work to do. Having 50,000 repositories in an organization strains some GitHub tools. We need to figure out how to explain the GitHub workflow to potential contributors who aren't software developers. We need to  make bibliographic metadata more git-friendly. And we need to create a "continuous integration system" for building ebooks.

Who knows, it might work.

Update January 30: Our NewsChallenge proposal is being funded!!!

The Perfect Bookstore Loses to Amazon

My book industry friends are always going on and on about "the book discovery problem". Last month, a bunch of us, convened by Chris Kubica, sat in a room in Manhattan's Meatpacking district and plotted out how to make the perfect online bookstore. "The discovery problem" occupied a big part of the discussion. Last year, Perseus Books gathered a smattering of New York's nerdiest at "the first Publishing Hackathon". The theme of the event, the "killer problem": "book discovery". Not to be outdone, HarperCollins sponsored a "BookSmash Challenge" to find "new ways of reading and discovering books".  

Here's the typical framing of "the book discovery problem". "When I go to a bookstore, I frequently leave with all sort of books I never meant to get. I see a book on the table, pick it up and start reading, and I end up buying it. But that sort of serendipitous discovery doesn't happen at Amazon. How do we recreate that experience?" Or "There are so many books published, how do we match readers to the books they'd like best?"

This "problem" has always seemed a bit bogus to me. First of all, when I'm on the internet, I'm constantly running across interesting sounding books. There are usually links pointing me at Amazon, and occasionally I'll buy the book.

As a consumer, I don't find I have a problem with book discovery. I'm not compulsive about finding new books; I'm compulsive about finishing the book I've read half of. When I finish a book, it's usually two in the morning and I really want to get to sleep. I have big stacks both real and virtual of books on my to-read list.

Finally, the "discovery problem" is a tractable one from a tech point of view. Throw a lot of data and some machine learning at the problem and a good-enough solution should emerge. (I should note here that  book "discovery" on the website I run, unglue.it, is terrible at the moment, but pretty soon it will be much better.)

So why on earth does Amazon, which throws huge amounts of money into capital investment, do such a middling job of book discovery?

Recently the obvious answer hit me in the face, as such answers are wont to do. The answer is that mediocre discovery creates a powerful business advantage for Amazon!

Consider the two most important discovery tools used on the Amazon website:

1. People who bought X also bought y.
2. Top seller lists.

Both of these methods have the property that the way to make these work for your book is for your book to sell a lot on Amazon. That means that any author or publisher that wants to sell a lot of books on Amazon will try to steer as many fans as possible to Amazon. More sales means more recommendations, which means more sales, and so on. Amazon is such a dominant bookseller that a bookstore could have the dreamiest features and pay the publisher a larger share of the retail selling price and still have the publisher try to push people to Amazon.

What happens in this sort of positive feedback system is pretty obvious to an electrical engineer like me, but Wikipedia's example of a cattle stampede makes a better picture.

The number of cattle running is proportional to the overall level of panic, which is proportional to...the number of cattle running! "Stampede loop" by Trevithj. CC BY-SA

Result: Stampede! Yeah, OK, these are sheep. But you get the point. "Herdwick Stampede" by Andy Docker. CC BY.

Imagine what would happen if Amazon shifted from sales-based recommendations to some sort of magic that matched a customer with the perfect book. Then instead of focusing effort on steering readers to Amazon, authors and publishers would concentrate on creating the perfect book. The rich would stop getting richer, and instead, reward would find the deserving.

Ain't never gonna happen. Stampedes sell more books.

Online Bookstores to Face Stringent Privacy Law in New Jersey

Before you read this post, be aware that this web page is sharing your usage with Google, Facebook, StatCounter.com, unglue.it and Harlequin.com. Google because this is Blogger. Facebook because there's a "Like" button, StatCounter because I use it to measure usage, and Harlequin because I embedded the cover for Rebecca Avery's Maid to Crave directly from Harlequin's website. Harlequin's web server has been sent the address of this page along with you IP address as part of the HTTP transaction that fetches the image, which, to be clear, is not a picture of me.

I'm pretty sure that having read the first paragraph, you're now able to give informed consent if I try to sell you a book (see unglue.it embed -->) and constitute myself as a book service for the purposes of a New Jersey "Reader Privacy Act", currently awaiting Governor Christie's signature. (Update Nov 22: Gov. Christie has conditionally vetoed the bill.) That act would make it unlawful to share information about your book use (borrowing, downloading, buying, reading, etc.) with a third party, in the absence of a court order to do so. That's good for your reading privacy, but a real problem for almost anyone running a commercial "book service".

Let's use Maid to Crave as an example. When you click on the link, your browser first sends a request to Harlequin.com. Using the instructions in the returned HTML, it then sends requests to a bunch of web servers to build the web page, complete with images, reviews and buy links. Here's the list of hosts contacted as my browser builds that page:

• www.harlequin.com
• stats.harlequin.com
• seal.verisign.com (A security company)
• www.goodreads.com  (The review comes from GoodReads. They're owned by Amazon.)
• seal.websecurity.norton.com (Another security company)
• www.google-analytics.com
• www.googletagservices.com
• stats.g.doubleclick.net (Doubleclick is an advertising network owned by Google)
• partner.googleadservices.com
• tpc.googlesyndication.com
• cdn.gigya.com (Gigya’s Consumer Identity Management platform helps businesses identify consumers across any device, achieve a single customer view by collecting and consolidating profile and activity data, and tap into first-party data to reach customers with more personalized marketing messaging.)
• cdn1.gigya.com
• cdn2.gigya.com
• cdn3.gigya.com
• comments.us1.gigya.com
• gscounters.us1.gigya.com
• www.facebook.com (I'm told this is a social network)
• connect.facebook.net
• static.ak.facebook.com
• s-static.ak.facebook.com
• fbstatic-a.akamaihd.net (Akamai is here helping to distribute facebook content)
• platform.twitter.com (yet another social network)
• syndication.twitter.com
• cdn.api.twitter.com
• edge.quantserve.com (QuantCast is an "audience research and behavioural advertising company")

All of these servers are given my IP address and the URL of the Harlequin page that I'm viewing. All of these companies except Verisign, Norton and Akamai also set tracking cookies that enable them to connect my browsing of the Harlequin site with my activity all over the web. The Guardian has a nice overview of these companies that track your use of the web. Most of them exist to better target ads at you. So don't be surprised if, once you've visited Harlequin, Amazon tries to sell you romance novels.

Certainly Harlequin qualifies as a commercial book service under the New Jersey law. And certainly Harlequin is giving personal information (IP addresses are personal information under the law) to a bunch of private entities without a court order. And most certainly it is doing so without informed consent. So its website is doing things that will be unlawful under the New Jersey law.

But it's not alone. Almost any online bookseller uses services like those used by Harlequin. Even Amazon, which is pretty much self contained, has to send your personal information to Ingram to fulfill many of the book orders sent to it. Under the New Jersey law, it appears that Amazon will need to get your informed consent to have Ingram send you a book. And really, do I care? Does this improve my reading privacy?

The companies that can ignore this law are Apple, Target, Walmart and the like. Book services are exempt if they derive less than 2% of their US consumer revenue from books. So yay Apple.

Other internet book services will likely respond to the law with pop-up legal notices like those you occasionally see on sites trying to comply with European privacy laws. "This site uses cookies to improve your browsing experience. OK?" They constitute privacy theater, a stupid legal show that doesn't improve user privacy one iota.

Lord knows we need some basic rules about privacy of our reading behavior. But I think the New Jersey law does a lousy job of dealing with the realities of today's internet. I wonder if we'll ever start a real discussion about what and when things should be private on the web.

Is the Kindle Direct Program MFN Legal?

If you sell an ebook through Amazon's Kindle Direct program, Amazon doesn't want you to offer it for less somewhere else. It's easy to understand why; if you're a consumer, you hate to pay $10 for an ebook on Amazon and then find that you can get it direct from the author for $5. But is it legal for Amazon to enjoin a publisher from offering better prices in other channels? In other words, is Amazon allowed to insist on a "Most Favored Nation" (MFN) provision?

Here's the provision in Amazon's Kindle Direct Program that constitutes an MFN:

4. Setting Your List Price
You must set your Digital Book's List Price (and change it from time-to-time if necessary) so that it is no higher than the list price in any sales channel for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book.
But if you choose the 70% Royalty Option, you must further set and adjust your List Price so that it is at least 20% below the list price in any sales channel for any physical edition of the Digital Book. 

I really don't know the answer, but I do know that Apple's MFN provision was a focus of the Department of Justice's successful prosecution of Apple and 5 colluding publishers for violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act. If Apple couldn't have a MFN, then how can Amazon insist on it, given their dominant market position in ebooks?

The Winston & Strawn law firm has a nice discussion of MFN clauses in the light of Judge Cote's decision in the US vs. Apple case. Here's the highlight:

Although the judge found that the MFN clause in this instance was critical to Apple’s ability to orchestrate the unlawful conspiracy, Judge Cote explicitly held that MFN clauses are not, in and of themselves, “inherently illegal.” Judge Cote explained that “entirely lawful contracts may contain an MFN …. The issue is not whether an entity … used an MFN, but whether it conspired to raise prices.” This determination, she stated, must be based on consideration of the “totality of the evidence,” rather than on the language of the agency agreement or MFN alone. Examining the facts in this particular case, Judge Cote found that Apple’s use of the MFN clause to facilitate the e-book conspiracy with the publishers constituted a “per se” violation of the antitrust laws.

Martin Coleman writes in mondaq:

depending on the economic and commercial circumstances, MFN clauses have on occasion caused concern to competition authorities. In particular:

• They can act as a disincentive to price cutting. If a supplier knows that, by offering a discount to any third-party customer, the supplier must also offer the customer benefiting from the MFN clause a discount to ensure that the latter enjoys the most favourable price, that is a "double cost" to price cutting, and therefore could have the effect of deterring price cuts and keeping prices higher than they might otherwise be.

In the European Union, Amazon has run into problems with a similar "Price Parity" provision for the Amazon Marketplace.  After inquiries by European Union regulatory agencies Amazon agreed NOT to enforce Price Parity, a policy that has been in effect since August 31, 2013. The Bookseller reported on the effect of this agreement in the (print) book market.

In the U.S., there's further confusion about distribution channel pricing because of the Robinson-Patman Act, which prevents them from pricing print books to favor one distributor over another. But according to the Federal Trade Commission, "The Act applies to commodities, but not to services, and to purchases, but not to leases." Since ebooks are licensed, not sold, it seems to this non-lawyer that Robinson-Patman shouldn't apply to ebooks.

The particular situation that has drawn my attention is the case of authors and publishers that make their ebooks available under Creative Commons licenses. Many of these authors also make their ebooks available via the Kindle Direct Publishing Program. There's nothing at all wrong with that - many readers prefer to get these ebooks onto their Kindles via Amazon, and are happy to know that some money ends up with the creators of the ebook. Amazon offers convenience, reliable customer service and wireless delivery.  

At Unglue.it, we're starting to offer Creative Commons creators the ability to ask people who download their ebooks for support (the program officially launches on April 30). The top concern these authors have expressed to us about this program is the "setting your list price" clause for their Kindle Direct channel. If they participate in our "Thanks for Ungluing" program they worry that Amazon will kick them out of the KDP program and the corresponding revenue stream.

We've done a few things to address this concern. Creators can set a "list price" in unglue.it- it's the suggested contribution for the pay-what-you-want download. And that's the price we report in our schema.org metadata.

But what if Amazon sees Unglue.it offering free downloads of books they're offering for $3.99 on the Kindle? Would they delist the book from the Kindle platform and kill that revenue stream? Or maybe delist the publisher entirely?

It seems to me that if Amazon did this, it could be running afoul of Judge Cote's guidelines for MFN provisions. Enforcing the MFN would amount to a retaliation against creators who offer lower prices (including zero) in other channels. Amazon doesn't even let you set your price to zero. 

What do you think?

Related articles

• Where do MFN clauses stand after Apple Price-Fixing Decision?
• The Procompetitive story that could undermine the DOJ's e-books antitrust case against Apple
• More Proof The Big Six Of Publishing Are Run By Morons
• Apple Inc. (AAPL) E-book Case Kills "Most-Favored Nation"

Publishing Hackathon a BookSmashing Success

Thursday, HarperCollins announced its BookSmash Programming Challenge. The book industry is nothing if not trend-driven, and after the success of the Publishing Hackathon, the BookSmash announcement qualifies "hacking" as a book industry trend.

The Hackathon turned out to be more significant than I expected. We should never underestimate the power of juxtaposing people with non-overlapping ignorance. I had the chance to talk to some of the other hacking teams last week, and they feel they learned a whole lot about the publishing industry. I also talked with Rick Joyce, one of the drivers of the event and Chief Marketing Officer at Perseus Books Group. He wrote me that his two revelations were "1) the importance of putting 'shareable data' (i.e. metadata) into a form developers want to work with (i.e. API's) vs. the feeds [publishers] traditionally supply to [their] trading partners. The world of developers are not going to incorporate you into their brilliant new lego creations if you don't give them lego-bricks to build with. And 2) this whole Open Innovation model is pretty mind expanding."

The organizers of the Publishing Hackathon got a lot of things right. The space was wonderful, the food was publisher-quality, and the publicity was excellent. (I admit that even the hype-laden website blurb that I criticized did its job well.) The variety of sponsors lent an open and collaborative atmosphere to the event. Even libraries were represented. It was a good decision to set a theme of "book discovery" for the event; this helped focus the participants and created a set of discussions that are likely to continue. Having the final presentations on the floor at BEA was brilliant. The party afterwards was fantastic.

The projects that were created at the hackathon won't solve the book discovery problem. The winning project, Evoke, won because it's both plausible and totally out of left field. But it's likely the knowledge gained by hackers and publishers during the process will advance the state of the art.

As with anything new, there are a number of things that could be improved on in future hackathons. Here's my list:

1. Everyone is a VIP. During the presentations, three rows of chairs in the front were set aside for "VIPs". No one sat in them. Next time, make the hackers the VIPs.
2. More prizes, more fun prizes. The gift economy of hacking and the cash economy of startups both need nurturing and cross-pollinating. Having one cash prize of $10,000 is less motivating than 5 $1000 prizes, and how do you split it if you have a big team? A prize consisting of dinner at a nice restaurant or some theater tickets might be a stronger motivation for participation.
3. Hacker Judges. None of the 10 judges for the 2013 Publishing Hackathon actually do any hacking. Only 3 of the 10 qualify as technologists. None of them are designers. (As far as I know.) If you want to send a message that design, technology, and code are important to publishing, then build that dialogue into the judging process as well.

Now about BookSmash.

At first, I was seriously underwhelmed by the BookSmash challenge. It seemed to be a way for HarperCollins to prop up the sad, desolate ghost towns that are the OpenBook API and the OpenBook Content API. (The OpenBook API was launched in April of 2012 with the support of Mashery; the forums had attracted exactly one developer in the last year.)

But perhaps I judged prematurely. The competition website claims that a number of authors, including Peter Drucker, Eloisa James and C. S. Lewis, will be "making their full works available via the BookSmash Challenge version of the OpenBook API." This could be really exciting, but as far as I can tell, it seems to be a bit of an exaggeration. I checked James' Desperate Duchesses; the content API returns the first 20% of the work. I tried Prince Caspian and got this result:

epubFetch unable to display this book

Sorry, we have not loaded this book into the system as yet.
We are loading books on a regular schedule, so please check back.

 Still, I can imagine some interesting things that might be done with this data.

Update June 18: Have been working with the friendly people at HarperCollins to iron out documentation issues that had been blocking my access. I'll put some hints in a new post.

/START RANT/ In 2013, Metadata APIs like Harper's are NOT enough. The metadata is not very good, and there's not enough of it. Why would a sane developer go to HarperCollins for product metadata when she could go to Amazon or Google Books and not have it limited to HarperCollins products, not have it limited by HarperCollins Terms and Conditions (which forbid any commercial use), AND have the selling price included, too??? Also Prince Caspian Movie Tie-in Edition (digest) is NOT the title of a book! If you want interesting things to happen with your metadata, let developers download THE WHOLE DATASET! That's how you get the data to Amazon and BN, and that's how you should get it to developers! /END RANT/

It's like Rick Joyce said. If you want people to build cool things, you have to give them lots of cool bricks.

Publishing Hackathon Pretty Much Ignores eBooks

The "First Annual" Publishing Hackathon was this weekend. As advertised, I participated and worked on an EPUB backmatter project. My awesome team consisted of me, Javascript/Ruby developer Max Jacobson (who's going to be even more highly sought-after when he finishes Rails school this summer), and TLC librarian Dianne Coan.

Here's our demo video:

 

Here's how we described the project:

Book Discovery INSIDE the eBook

When is a reader most receptive to reading suggestions? Right when they’ve finished a book of course! That’s why printed books have information about other books by the same author, the first chapter of the next book in the series and similar material at the end as part of the back matter.

Back matter has existed pretty much as long as books have. This includes the appendix, glossary, index, and bibliography. Back matter for digital books needs to be optimized to serve the needs of the digital reader. An informal survey by @suw indicates the most popular endmatter desires were other books by the same author and some information about the author.

Digital back matter for ebooks is not constrained by having to proceed the publication; unlike print, digital back matter can be kept up to date with the release of new content. For instance, if an author publishes a sequel, that title could be included in previously published ebooks.

It’s easy to insert a page listing an author’s other books at the end of an ebook, but how do you keep that list up-to-date? What if you’ve developed a great recommendation system to do “if you liked Pride and Prejudice, you’ll like X”? (or maybe “if you hated...”!)

The answer is to make use of the javascript capability of emerging ebook environments. Our project explores means of connecting to APIs from within an EPUB for the purpose of suggesting the user’s next read.

An existence proof is the “widget” capability of the iBooks iAuthor platform. It allows the insertion of html snippets into extended EPUB. Unfortunately, the javascript capability of ebook reading platforms, like the future, is unevenly distributed.

For this demo, we tested three reading EPUB environments, Readium, Readmill, and iBooks. We modified the Project Gutenberg EPUB version of Pride and Prejudice to include hooks and data to other books by Jane Austen.

Readium, which has been built as an EPUB3 reference environment, is the most capable for our purposes. It supports both javascript and connections to external web resources. In Readium, our EPUB displays the set of books by Jane Austen returned by the ReadMill API.

Apple iBooks has full javascript capability, but doesn’t allow connections to external resources (except perhaps via iBooks Author hooks- this deserves further investigation.) In iBooks, our EPUB displays a result page that we generated and embedded based on Jane Austen works published in 1813, when Pride and Prejudice released. We imagine that such embedded resources could be inserted at download time in a future production bookstore or library environment.

The Readmill environment does not support javascript at all at this time, so ironically, we’re not able to display the Readmill API results, or the iframe embedded resource.

Offline reading in Readium displays the resource embedded in the EPUB, similar to the iBooks version.

There were 30 projects in total presented at the end. Here's the list, along with my one sentence summary.

Banned Books in America

Website that maps book banning incidents and links them to Openlibrary

Book Discoverability: A Graphical Solution

Concept for browsing books as nodes on a graph.

Book Discovery INSIDE the eBook

This was us! Our demo crashed and burned. The popup screens from the wifi messed up the ebook reader display of embedded dynamic content.

BookCity Finalist!

Website that recommends books by connecting them to cities.

BookieGoer

Website that helps you lend the books you've borrowed from the library.

Booklvrs: Read. Discover. Meet.

App that advertises the ebook you're reading to the people around you.

bookmatchup

Website that multi-factor-matches you to books.

BookMob

Website that aggregates book recommendations from your twitter followers.

bookshelf.me

Website that displays books as if they were on a bookshelf. I'm pretty sure there was more to it.

Publy.io

Website that recommends books to users based on books they've liked.

Captiv Finalist!

App and Website that uses machine learning algorithms and your tweet about last night's party to combat the short attention span of Today's Readers. I may not have understood this one.

Coverlist Finalist!

Website that believes in judging books by their cover.

Evoke Finalist and clear judging favorite!

Pinteresty website that recommends books based on emotions categorization.

Happy Chapter

App that recommends books based on tags you click.

I read your Brain

Brain-sensing rabbit ears that wiggle depending on your response to a book from a website.

IGNITE

Website that lets users rate romance novels for steaminess.

KooBrowser Finalist!

Browser plugin that analyses what you read to better sell you books.

Library Atlas Finalist!

Mobile app that sends you geographically appropriate quotes depending on where you are. My favorite.

Literary Trinket with Book Wish

3D printed QR-ish code baubles. Cooler than it sounds.

Meadows

Website that turns reading into a game where you earn points.

Meme a book

Website that turns books into lolcats. (I may not have described this accurately.)

MovieReader

Website that recommends books connected to the movie you just saw.

NYPL Reinvent

Analysis of NYPL metadata advocating a divorce of the library from its classification system.

OkLetsRead!

Website offering crowd-funded serial fiction (ebooks).

Quiply

Website that recommends books based on a user's video viewing.

Reading Tollbooth: A Gateway to Book Discovery

Website to match kids to books.

Something2Read

Website that recommends books based on tags you click.

Valerie's Baby App

App that promotes literacy to a girl named Valerie by making sliding block puzzles and defining words at her.

Visibrary

Website that uses library data to make graphical book circles.

Vookstore

Website that turns ex-bookstore owners into book curation engines.

Interestingly, only 3 of the 30 projects addressed ebooks at all, which seems a bit odd to me, considering the industry's ongoing transition from print to digital. The emphasis on apps (7) and websites (21) is partly due to Hackathon's theme of book discovery, but it also says something about the tech industry. Apps and websites are what the NY tech industry is doing in 2013, not ebooks. Clearly, the publishing community developing ebooks and ebook standards needs to do more outreach to developers; the hackathon was a good first step.

It's also worth noting the growing importance of geo-tagging and other non-traditional metadata. In the new world of publishing discovery, readers want books that fit their mode right where they want to be. Neither MARC nor ONIX know enough to help.

My library friends should rest assured that the hackers did not at all ignore libraries. Although $1000 prize from NYPL was a factor, the ease of connecting to NYPL and OpenLibrary helped a lot. The RDA prize, it should be noted, went unclaimed.

Update: Sorry, Coverlist, I omitted your finalist status. Corrected!

Book Publishing After the JOBS Act Revolution

On Monday, the US Senate confirmed Mary Jo White as the new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC). The book industry will never be the same. No, that's not a non sequitur.

A year ago, a bipartisan majority in Congress passed the "Jumpstart Our Business Startups" or JOBS Act, and President Obama signed the legislation on April 5, 2012, thus accomplishing the first major overhaul of the nation's securities laws in over forty years. Perhaps the most far-reaching provision of the JOBS Act is the legalization of equity crowd funding. But not quite yet. The SEC has not published the rules that would implement the JOBS Act, and so it's not yet legal to crowd fund a business, unless your crowd is all millionaires.

#strangersproject

"But what about Kickstarter?" you may be asking yourself. "Isn't that legal?"

Kickstarter and businesses like it (Unglue.it, which I run, is one) take great pains to prevent projects on the site from offering any sort of tangible equity. Instead of equity-based crowd funding, these site offer rewards-based projects and products. People become backers on Kickstarter because of the rewards they get if the project a success. In many ways, Kickstarter is just a site where creators pre-sell products that don't exist. A supporter on Unglue.it might get a signed manuscript or some other reward,  but it's the intangible equity of making a book free to the world that drives the site.

By contrast, the backers on an equity-based crowd funding platform could receive shares in a business.  So on a crowd-funding site for books, the backers might become investors in the individual books, and would make money if the books turned a profit. If you happened to invest in Fifty Shades...

From an author's point of view, this would completely change the game of publishing. Instead of relying on an insider network of literary agents who market book properties to publishers, an author would put proposals on a book-funding site. They'd line up a team of free-lance editors, illustrators, designers and developers, and the literary proposal would look like a mini-business plan. (More likely the author would seek help from a new class of social-media-savvy literary product-manager-agents who specialize in marketing to the crowd funders.) The crowd – probably consisting of voracious readers hoping to earn a little money from their obsession- would fund the books that had the best chance of success. That same crowd would be the marketing vanguard for the book when it's finally published; how can corporate publishing compete with that?

There's nothing intrinsic about crowd-funding that restricts this sort of fund-raising to unknown authors looking for a first advance. The JOBS act restricts the amount raised from "unqualified investors" to $1,000,000, so the really big name authors would have to tap the "qualified investor" funding market. (An individual with more than a million dollars in assets excluding home and vehicles is considered "qualified")

Once equity crowd-funding becomes established for books (and it WILL happen!), incumbent publishing houses will have lost, at a stroke, their oligopoly on books as investment vehicles. Already, publishers are outsourcing their design, editorial, production, distribution and sales functions; providing capital is their last bastion of essential function. They will have to participate in the new markets or they will dissipate into irrelevancy.

The reason the SEC has not issued the new regulations implementing JOBS is apparently because the previous Chairwoman, Mary Schapiro, had reservations about opening the gates to crowd-funding. The SEC's mindset is to protect ordinary investors from being fleeced by Wall Street sharks.  One would assume that President Obama's new appointee will be motivated to implement what could be a signature accomplishment of the Obama administration. So Monday's confirmation of Mary Jo White could signal the start of a new era of American investment.

Tim Draper at SVCrowdFund
by Return On Change

I had not paid attention to the possibilities of equity crowd funding for books until I attended last week's "SVCrowdFund" conference in Palo Alto. There I met many of the people who had been instrumental in getting the JOBS Act introduced and passed. There was electricity in the air, and my head is still spinning.

What's needed to make equity crowd funding for books a reality is a platform that has both crowd funding and publishing functions. Mostly, investors in books need to be protected from the sort of accounting shenanigans that prevent advances from earning out and royalties from amounting to more than a few pennies per copy. They also need some insurance against authors who don't deliver their promised manuscripts. All parties need sound legal agreements, business plan templates and investment entities. But above all, none of it will work without copious transparency and openness.

I've been trying to think some of these things through. It's a pretty big project, needing a variety of expertise. If you'd like to join me and others in some discussion, please let me know, and I'll organize something. Or leave a comment.

Resources
Community/Crowd Funding for Books

• Unglue.it
• PubSlush
• Unbound
• Singularity & Co.
• Knowledge Unlatched
• TenPages

Disaggregated Publishing

• Smashwords
• BiblioCrunch
• PressBooks
• CreateSpace
• LuLu

JOBS Act

• Text of the Bill (thomas.loc.gov)
• SEC impedes crowd-funding revolution (bankrate.com)
• Slow-moving SEC blamed for Blocking JOBS Act (politico)
• JOBS Act, One Year Later: Hang Tight, Equity Crowdfunding Is Coming (news.terra.com)
• Massolution Crowdfunding Report
• Crowdfunding Industry Celebrates First Anniversary of JOBS Act Despite Delays (techcrunch)

Publishing's Amazon Powered Future

This is what I heard an Amazon executive say today at AWS Summit 2012:

"The boundaries are clear in EC2. Amazon is responsible for the dirt and the hypervisor; the customer is responsible for everything else".

If you want to understand the future of publishing, you really need to understand that statement, because very likely it reflects the corporate mindset of Amazon, and Amazon didn't get to be Amazon by having a schizophrenic mindset.

EC2 stands for "Elastic Compute Cloud" which is part of Amazon Web Services (AWS). EC2 allows companies to rent server space in Amazon's global data centers. Amazon has built a set of management services that allows anyone to scale their computing resources up or down with a few clicks of a button. The value proposition is staggering in both directions. Cycle Computing, which presented today described how they had assembled a 50,000 core supercomputer (representing $20 million worth of hardware) at a cost of $4829 per hour for a 3 hour drug discovery computation. The bottom end is equally staggering. A "micro instance" can be had for a quarter cent per hour. That's $23 per year.

The reason that Amazon does this is not to put IBM out of business. It's to make their website operations more efficient. Jeff Bezos saw that Amazon was putting lots of money into computing infrastructure, and he wanted to make sure that the operation was competitive with anything outside Amazon. By opening up the data center to outside users, he forced the operation to be more efficient.

Amazon also benefits from economies of scale. It can get better prices on components, cheaper bandwidth, lower electricity rates and better utilization of the data centers it's sprinkled around the world. Perhaps even more important is the creative energy from users that innovates around Amazon's technical infrastructure. Amazon was able to easily turn on video streaming to the Kindle Fire partly because Netflix was already using AWS to stream movies at a massive scale.

Dirt was a new term for me. It means physical infrastructure, what we used to call hardware and the data center. A hypervisor is software that enables virtualization- the ability to share physical computer hardware to power multiple virtual server systems. My company, Gluejar, owns no physical web servers. To run Unglue.it, we have 5 servers in EC2, for which we pay about a thousand dollars a month, all extras included. We could probably pay half that with a bit of work, and I spent an hour this afternoon listening to an Amazon software evangelist teach hundreds of techies how to spend LESS money with AWS.

What the dirt and the hypervisor share is that they benefit from economies of scale. If 10,000 companies share data centers, then not only is the data center cheaper for everyone, but together the companies can afford to have multiple, redundant data centers spread around the world. 10,000 companies sharing a pool of servers can fund development of scaling software, tools that make fault tolerance and high availability easy, load balancers, automated deployment systems, performance monitoring, security systems, and on and on.

Amazon is fundamentally a company about scale. The common thread between AWS and the internet book seller of 1995 is the identification of markets with large inefficiencies that could be eliminated by using the internet to amass scale. Amazon has alway been willing to lose money to achieve that scale. But this isn't predatory in the sense that having achieved market dominance, they raise prices. Instead, it's ruthless in that once scale is achieved, the resulting efficiencies can't be matched by anyone else.

It seems clear that Amazon has identified the publishing industry as a target ripe for further forcible efficiency improvements. But the nightmare narrative being spun by the publishing echo chamber is tragically unaware of how Amazon works. Maybe it's because publishers imagine that Amazon will do what they would do if they had Amazon's market power. But Amazon won't extort huge sums of money from powerless consumers. Instead, they will ruthlessly bring efficiency to every process involved in publishing. And then they'll invite everyone to use their ruthlessly efficient services.

Just like Amazon Web Services have enabled thousands of scaleable web startups and has made thousands of established companies more efficient, I predict that Amazon Publishing Services will enable thousands of new publishers and make thousands of established publishers more efficient. Amazon's Editing Turk will connect thousands of writers to pools of editors who will work harder at a lower cost. Amazon Creative Services will provide illustrations and graphic design. Amazon Elastic Curation will match groups of consumers with new authors writing the books they want to read. And Amazon Creative Capital will help visionaries invest in promising projects and writers. Amazon will spend to achieve scale wherever scale drives economies, and everywhere else, Amazon will provide hypervisors to match talent with tasks.

So the future of publishing will be dominated by publishers who take advantage of the various efficiencies of scale forged by Amazon (and Amazon competitors, we hope). The rest won't be worth talking about, except as an expression of nostalgia. The efficiencies will have many unfortunate effects, which professors will write books about. But they won't sell well. There are some things that even Amazon can't do.

Portability is Amazon's Kryptonite

Red Kryptonite

If you've been reading the blogs and the papers, you probably know that the US Department of Justice has bestowed super-powers on that web-shopping-site based in Seattle. Sure, they're soul-crushingly competent, but take away their Starbucks coffee and expose them to a smart start-up, and they'll probably become as threateningly geriatric as that code shop in Redmond.

So if you're Lex Luthor, CEO of Penguin, what do you do when Superman is flying loops around your latinum supply chain? You reach for a supply of kryptonite, of course.

It's easy to forget that not too long ago, Apple was left for dead and every startup presenting to a VC would dread the inevitable question: if you succeed, how will Microsoft crush you? How things change in the tech world! Microsoft's desire to collect a toll on everything proved to be its weakness. Microsoft is still a big player, but it's not the monster it used to be.

So what is Amazon's weakness in the book business? Has it become an unstoppable monopoly?

The "Collusive 5" publishers thought that the way to thwart Amazon's monopolism was to impose the "Agency Model" which allowed them to dictate retail prices. One problem with this strategy (apart from the illegal thing) was that their agency was a sham. In a true agency model, retailers would act as "sales agents" for the publishers, who would be the real sellers, setting prices and providing products. But what the Collusive 5 implemented was sham agency, in that they relied on the retailer (Amazon, Apple, Nook, Kobo) to do everything with the books except set the price. The retailer does customer service, fulfillment, rights management, viewing platform, even file integrity. The "seller" just pours content into ebook molds and props up the retailer margin, giving lots of other companies the chance to feed at the ebook trough.

This bean-counter's view of innovation mistook the real source of Amazon's growing market power. Barriers to entry, not profit margin, are the pillars that would sustain an Amazon ebook monopoly. And the biggest barrier to entry is the investment that consumers make in the Kindle platform. If it was just the reader device, it would be a temporary investment. Kindles are cheaply made, and they die  after a few years. It's the books on the e-shelves that consumers are loathe to toss in a digital trashbin. If consumers could take their purchases to any platform, Amazon's putative monopoly would melt away the moment some startup figured out how to build a better reading environment. Remember when no one could imagine a search engine competing against the likes of Yahoo, MSN and Alta Vista?

eBook portability is Amazon's kryptonite. If the vaunted Agency Model were not a sham, publishers could simply make portability a standard provision of their agency contracts: "Thou shalt enable portability". And that would be it. No collusion around pricing or discounts would be needed. Amazon could discount the living daylights out of their ebooks, but customers would still judge its competitors on their merits.

Some words about how portability could be implemented: It's been widely discussed that DRM is the biggest impediment to ebook portability. But portability can be implemented without eliminating DRM.  All that's needed is a digital-signed-receipt system. No difference if DRM were set aside for something more magical, morepotterish. Customers would receive a proof of purchase that could be presented to any authorized reading platform. It's not comic-book science, it's mundane coding stuff. I mean, you've hired some great techies, big publishers, why not listen to them for a change? Plus, coders are a lot cheaper than the antitrust lawyers you're not listening to.

So there's this little problem with ISBN assignment. ISBN gets used to identify ebooks, and BISG, in its standardized wisdom, decided that different ISBNs are given to Kindle ebooks and EPUB ebooks. So many people are unsure how to fulfill a consumer's ebook receipt for a book identified with ISBN. There's some work to do, but not anything you need superpowers for. It's muggle technology powering Pottermore, not magic.

Sweetbreads at Picholine
(CC BY-NC-ND by roboppy)

One more thing, big publishers. When you regrow your agency testicles, would you please tell your fruity Agents how you feel about reading platforms that pervert your content and think they know where your books can link to? I can think of all sorts of ways to make new monopolies out of that.

Oh, and when unglue.it colludes with y'all to achieve ultra-portable world domination, it doesn't count unless we do it at Picholine.

The Slow Books Movement

An interesting idea is a powerful thing, but you can't eat it. You really have to give it away to make it worth anything, and even then you can't eat it. So what if you're good at having interesting ideas? You can go arounds giving talk at conferences. If the idea is incomprehensible enough, maybe you can even get tenure and a salary out of it. But what if it's an easy idea, one that resonates with a lot of people? Then your best option for making a living off the idea for a while is to write a best-selling book.


 Clay Johnson has an interesting idea, and I encountered his talk at this month's Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. I can even explain it for you, but of course Johnson does it much more entertainingly, and the TOC talk is on the web. In short, Johnson's thesis is that the things that are right and wrong with out information diets are the same things that are right and wrong with our food diets.

Humans are evolved to prefer fat and sugar over the things that are good for us because these foods were scarce in the environment we evolved in. Fat and sugar aren't scarce anymore, and the result is that we eat too much of them and are not as healthy as we could be. Worse, the economic structure of our society has created incentives for corporations to create huge complex systems that efficiently feed us sweet fatty food at a low cost. It's what we want. Fast Food.

Thus the "slow food movement". Slow food is the opposite of fast food. Inefficiently and locally produced with few of the benefits of technology or high fructose corn syrup from Iowa. Cooked from raw ingredients, crafted by a grandmother in a small kitchen. High in fiber, vitamins, protein and minerals. Low in antibiotics and fossil fuel byproducts. I exaggerate, but I'm smelling a frozen pie in the oven, and my zeal for slowness is tempered by my desire... to finish writing before it cools!

We suffer similarly from our "information diets". People want information that confirms what they already believe. Who wants to be intellectually challenged, really? We want sweet stories that entertain us, make our lives seem justified, and feed the emotions we most want to feel. And so we get information products designed to give us what we want, not what's good for us. Our news is designed and selected for search engine optimization rather than human wisdom maximization. It's Fox News and MSNBC, not Walter Cronkite and the New York Times.

Johnson's idea and his presentation of it are so tasty, so delectable, so comforting, that once you absorb it you become suspicious that it's self-referential. Are we liking the idea because it's confirming a bias we already have? Is it a "Fast Idea"? Aaaaack!

Luckily there's a book, The Information Diet, published by O'Reilly. The book's cover looks like a cereal box, the kind that's supposed to be good for you. The book is thin and lean, and has little of the fat or sugar of Johnson's presentation. It has footnotes and ScienceDirect URLs in all their unshortened bleakness. There are no pictures. It's the ideal souvenir from a Clay Johnson talk. It grounds Johnsons talk in tight argument and factual background. It's a "Slow Book" for a "Fast Idea".

And this leads Johnson to a concept that he calls "Infoveganism" in the book, but more appealingly, "Slow Information" in his talk.

A healthy Information diet always starts locally-and your political information should be no different. The goings-on of your state representatives and city and county governments, along with your school boards, and other local government offices are the best, healthiest forms of content for political news, and should be consumed over the national or global news.

Really. The main problem I have with Johnson's book is its "veganism". It's a sermon that, as much as I might agree with it, is not going to change my behavior.

It's my view that economic and social incentives are what ultimately determine the behavior of organisms, not information, whether slow or fast. If we want a better information diet, we need to alter the economics of information availability. That's why a society with libraries can be better that a society with only bookstores, Harry Potter notwithstanding. It's also why I'm developing Unglue.it. If authors and publishers are rewarded for the value that people have received from books rather than for the catchiness of the cover art or the placement in the bookstore, we'll have better books to read. The books will last longer, and they'll connect people in richer ways. They'll be "slow books" because the economic model will have a long view.

I think I'll skip the whipped cream on my apple pie!