Read about Protean Press’s latest book, “Kipling’s Cat” by Anne Cabot Wyman in the Gloucester Daily Times, or at the Wyman book site. Exciting times!

It seems to me that a Pedagogical Interface (PI) will prove to be a primary outcome of online publishing. Since the 1990s, publishers have gotten very good at using the internet as an infinite library of digits, a gigantic distribution pipe with a cash register at every possible outlet, an immediate means to access everyone on the globe through computers, pdas, phones, etc., delivering digitized content, new and repurposed. But so what, if all we are doing is republishing articles and pictures (PDFs) of static books (ebooks), and sharing self-contained recordings?

The online medium allows for dynamic, recorded interaction and change between perceiver and perceived, and thus I think that it is in the arena of music where a PI might best be developed, an infrastructure for learning about “content” while experiencing it. Bob Stein and the Voyager group was responsible for an early incarnation of the PI in the 1990s with their Schubert Trout Quintet. This CD application for the Mac was in effect living, breathing liner notes, accompanying the musical performance of this exquisite music. They also produced a Beethoven CD, an archive copy of which can be found at http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/published_by_the_voyager_compa.html

Music is universal (no need of translation), experiential, transcendent; our familiar media of paper (books, sheet music, liner notes, articles) is arguably the wrong medium for the musical message. Developing the PI in this area could bring us listeners, learners, performers to a vibrant new terra incognita . Maybe.

Whether one chooses to define ownership of content through copyright (treating creative output as an object to be owned and bought and sold by a defined party over a specified period of years), or through the European model of “moral rights” (permanently and indelibly linking the author or artist to the work of art s/he created), more and more, the whole semantics of creative intentionality and meaning are called into question in cyberspace.

An article, a book, these are things in themselves, with beginnings, middles, and ends. But constellations of chunked-up, kinetic, hyperlinked, multiauthored, google-ad-enriched content clusters may convey an imaginative reality far different from that which any of the authors of the single chunks of content envisioned. And judiciously placed advertisements, colors and fontings, juxtapositions with other content chunks or ads, can create nuances and meanings the original authors never intended.

As we revisit our copyright and moral rights laws, we need to be mindful of one of the first intentions of copyright: the protection of a reader’s right to know the origins and authorship — the authenticity — of content.

I attended my first New England Independent Booksellers (NEIBA) conference in Hartford the other weekend, where many participants bemoaned the drop in the number of attendees. Some said the show used to be twice as big, say ten years ago, when there were many more independent bookstores. Apparently it was much more vital then, before the economy tanked, and the bookselling business started to be dominated by the chains and boxes, and online giants like Amazon.

This made me think that things really not are as they seem: just as Amazon is not really a bookstore after all (they can afford to treat books with all their rich metadata as loss leaders, while aggregating the *real* prize, their buyer profiles), so is the *real* value in an independent bookstore not in the physical book at all, but in what the customer gets for “free” — the knowledge of the bookseller or clerk. That human interface, the local person who reads voraciously and can effectively build a bookstore responsive to a community’s need to know and appetite for literature, who can recommend books to familiar customers, is one wetware casualty of the online chain store revolution that will be most difficult to replace with software, no matter how user friendly.