“Americans shoot first, ask questions later,” said the moderator of one panel discussion on the Google settlement held at this week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, reflecting widespread sentiment among non-US-based publishers and agents. “You Americans are all asleep,” noted one agent to me. “Why are you allowing this takeover of the publishing industry by a .com technology company?” Despite its industry-changing goal of creating the first and comprehensive global online library/bookstore out of the 10 million books it has scanned so far, Google had no on-the-floor presence at Frankfurt, the largest book fair in the world and the meeting point for the industry every October. (As of this date, Google has also not taken space at the London Book Fair for April 2010; in earlier years, it had taken out large stand space.) As one publisher put it, “Google is the shark swimming above our heads this year.” The Google settlement, supported by both Google and the AAP (Association of American Publishers), is currently being adjudicated in the USA; the US Department of Justice urges the court to reject the settlement in its current form. Many anticipate that this suit may result in a major challenge to existing copyright and moral rights legislation, ultimately redefining the digital realities of intellectual property.

A LinkedIn blogger asked: Is the book publishing business model so broken that we need patrons to subsidize our work? ( see http://is.gd/BNkV )

Patronage is one way to do it, but, as with advertising in books, if you follow the money, you may well find that the lucre influences the content, and compromises objectivity. Democracy depends on a strong free press. So while successful new business models will need to depart from the traditional reader-paid model, perhaps a winning strategy will involve codification of the idea interchange around content, resulting in a system involving floating value, where readers either pay or get paid, depending on metrics such as the value of their contribution to the content through comments or other additions, access to selected reader’s bibliometrics (their recorded thoughtpath through content clusters or libraries), their endorsement of any given author or content, or, conversely, their insistence on avoiding all of the above “reading out loud” features and remaining anonymous (and thus paying rather than getting paid for accessing content). IMHO, what we strive for here as we build the new publishing system is a meritocracy of mind, not more commercialization of ideas. For this to work, I think we seek a new pedagogical interface, need to look beyond the prevalent interpretation of content value deriving from the dissemination (and attendant protection) of *copies* of things, into a more organic type of difference engine where ideas morph and change, and occasionally and at will manifest themselves in tangible “books.” Our value chain pulls us outside of the world of tangible products now, folks! We are amphibians, flopping on the beach of a great and rich new continent of global idea interchange, which is facilitated by the Internet. And the global Internet, for the moment at least, remains Free and Open. Most of its architects and founders are still verticals, walking among us, dedicated to keeping it Free and Open, from a technological point of view. What are we publishers going to do about it?

In April, OBS and its subsidiary Protean Press will attend the London Book Fair with the goal to seek out publishing partners for new Protean Press titles. We will be:

• Selling paperback, foreign, and other sub rights and licenses to Joe Garland’s “Unknown Soldiers: Reliving World War II in Europe,” which has been published to much acclaim in the USA and is now in its second printing.
• Advancing a new 2010 title, Anne Cabot Wyman’s “Kipling’s Cat: A Memoir of My Father,” wherein the author remembers her Father, Jeffries Wyman – scientist (inventor of the scientific discipline allostery), painter, writer, Boston “Blue Blood” and free spirit — as she knew and loved him. A most unconventional and honest book. 

OBS has been serving the publishing industry since 1982. Now we are poised to create a new model for publishing companies and the professionals who keep the industry alive.

The following paper by Laura Fillmore was accepted for publication by Common Ground in March 2008 (she serves on their Board, and has presented at their Book Publishing Conference).

The Chinese man stands alone in the road, apparently stopping a parade of approaching tanks. This photograph from Tiananmen Square’s spring of 1989, taken by AP photographer Jeff Widener, first woke us up to the power of the Internet, back before most people even knew there was an Internet. First-person, real-time accounts of what sounded like a massacre of students in Beijing began appearing on Martial Arts Listservs. The eyewitnesses didn’t work for the New York Times or CNN—they were university students who suddenly had a megaphone whose sound reached around the globe. Even their government couldn’t turn the Internet off; their voices couldn’t be censored, sold, or silenced. We had entered an age where the news belonged to any One Man who had access to an internetworked computer and knew how to type.

The “One Man” poster hangs on the office wall at Open Book Systems (OBS) in Rockport. I ordered the poster in 1989, on the Internet, but paid offline, with a check, because back then, it was illegal to buy and sell anything on the Internet. Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) reserved the vast power of our instantaneous and freely accessible global network of networks for research, science, and government communications. “Wild and woolly,” they called it. Ungovernable. Unstoppable. Infinitely expansive. It was a free and open frontier gatekeepered by geeks, librarians, and academics. No one would dare to so much as e-mail an invoice using the new Internet, polluting its packets with talk of money. Back then, there was no spam; every e-mail had a familiar FROM line. Even though anonymity was possible, most power users around the world knew each other, and observed a definite etiquette. “You’ve got mail” was a gratifying state to be in.

When the Information Highway opened for business in 1992, things changed. Big players like L.L. Bean and Amazon started selling products and clearing credit cards online, then eBay turned the world into a floating-price bazaar. The early doubts whether people would use their credit cards online proved to have little substance; people not only bought and sold online, but moved their personal banking into cyberspace. With the dawn of e-commerce, spammers started in earnest, glutting our mailboxes with unsolicited come-ons for mortgages and penis enlargements, Vioxx and academic degrees. In the new e-commerce space, we can follow the money and discover what looks like the flip side of the almost innocent network of networks of 1989, protected by its AUPs.

Not too long ago, Google, the world’s leading search engine, announced a business deal with the Chinese Government to release a censored Chinese version of its proprietary search engine, which at once captures a searcher’s keystrokes as he enters in search terms, records the unique Internet Protocol (IP) address of his machine, and also controls the displayed search results. If you search on the term “Tiananmen Square” in the U.S., the search results bring pictures of tanks and a pointer to the One Man (a.k.a. Tank Man) photograph; make the same search from within China, where the government is trying to control the Internet, and you see a peaceful park scene.

At first, it is difficult to understand why Google, the company that promised to do no evil, has taken these steps, which appear to be clearly against at least three tenets of their corporate philosophy posted at

http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/tenthings.html:

4. Democracy on the web works.

6. You can make money without doing evil.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.

 On one hand, it’s a business deal, and as a publicly traded company, they owe it to their shareholders to maximize profits. A cynic might suggest that Google profits come at the expense of the freedom of speech exercised by the students in 1989, as symbolized by the One Man photo. But on the other hand, one company’s actions can’t change the architecture of the Internet, and perhaps Google programmers better than most people understand that, like water and air, information does want to be free, despite their best efforts. Content may leak around the edges of the miles of secure Chinese Google search code. By using variant spellings, for example, a savvy Chinese with the desire to communicate can get the same search results for “Tiananmen Square” as a Google user in the U.S. And so we learn once again that, even though the Acceptable Use Policies have lost their sway and e-commerce is here to stay, still, the very open architecture of the Internet continues to defy the efforts of those trying to limit, censor, or contain its content.