What’s New at Open Book Systems

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–see http://commongroundpublishing.com/conferences.html )

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.

Illustrating the M. C. Escher–like nature of information authentication on the Net, here’s an e-mail we received from one of our authors, Professor Gregory J. E. Rawlins, whose latest book on technology is in progress and online:

so i’m doing (yet another) rewrite of the book and i’m in the second
chapter, part of which is on slavery. i’m googling to check a fact and come
across the wikipedia page on slavery in medieval europe. skimming down the
page, one interesting fact that i’d unearthed maybe a year ago in an obscure
journal caught my eye: at least 10,000 european slaves were sold in venice
in the early 15th century. ha! i think to myself, i better hurry up and
finish this damned book! others are ferreting out the same obscure sources
i found over the endless years of research on this damned book! so i click
on the reference for the factoid and… it points to me :).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_trade_in_the_Middle_Ages#_note-17

wikipedia is backing a statement of fact with a reference to an online,
not-yet-published book. at least they should have looked up my detailed
references to the literature to support the factoid in my notes just in
case i was just making stuff up….i blame google for this though since for
certain obscure things googling them turns up my book draft at or near the
top, so presumably other folks out there are linking to other bits and
pieces of the draft. of course i’m pleased, but you should fear for the future my friends

best,

gregory.

Some online publishers searching for alternative business models to the traditional one, where the readers pay for content, arrive at the sponsorship and advertising models, where private interests pay the publisher to make content available for free. This is in return for some benefit to the sponsor, which may involve a sponsor logo or pop-up integrated with the content, or an unobtrusive URL at the bottom of a page. There is no definite recipe.

The practice raises two issues immediately: the privacy of users, and the objectivity of the sponsored content. On the latter issue, in this month’s Condé Nast Portfolio Jeff VanDam writes an article called “Pharma’s Fees: How the big drugmakers tend to your doctor”, in which he lists seven of the international pharmaceutical giants and traces approximately $9 million they’ve spent supporting doctors’ research. He points out one example that illustrates the problem of objectivity in sponsored publishing. GlaxoSmithKline (makers of Paxil and Zantac) paid $150,752 to pediatric allergist Todd Mahr, who participated in a clinical trial for their anti-asthma drug, Advair Diskus. He subsequently “coauthored a 2006 paper that recommended Advair-style inhalers; footnotes in the paper refer readers to GSK’s website.”

Whether actual or perceived, the potential influence a paying sponsor has over the content it endorses challenges the essential advantage traditional publishers have over their Web-based colleagues: their reputation for authenticity established over years, the “brand” or covenant they have with their readers to publish the truth. Many readers take for granted that, prior to publication, “brand name” publishers put content that bears their imprimatur through an authenticating process that includes selection, peer review, editing, fact checking, permissions acquisition, and proofreading. The sponsorship model threatens to weaken this covenant with the readers.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite.

—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Back when books were things, it was easier to measure success or failure based on quantifiable metrics like print runs, sales, years in print, citations. Paper books are finite, present as mass; they take up shelf space. If I loan you my copy of Romeo and Juliet, I’m left empty-handed. Just as if you pay me to siphon the gas out of my tank and put it into yours, you drive and I stand still. That’s the economy of scarcity. Publishers are still struggling to impose on their e-books these outdated business models from the age of print, and finding that friction results.

Readers don’t appreciate it when their e-reader screens go dark in midsentence because the read-ometer stopped running; librarians suffering from shrinking wartime budgets resent paying for “a copy” of an e-book (which is really quite ethereal in nature and not a copy at all) and then being required to treat it like a finite artifact and loan it out one at a time, rather than offering network access to all readers.

When mass transmutes into the infinite, when books become e-books, the age of abundance arrives and the rules change. New roles for publisher, author, and reader are evolving, and new tools are required to establish and convey the value of ideas and information. What used to be freely exchanged—like knowledge—one now pays consultants for. What used to be sold—like a copy of a book—is free. We need to develop new value paradigms to accommodate the creation and evolution of knowledge in and between humans, perhaps adapting our old business models from books (per-copy), entertainment (performance), and school (tuition)—but perhaps the Internet-based value exchange is in fact something startlingly new.

Meantime, while there is so much struggle in the publishing business about commoditizing current-copyright content for sale, how to do it, what to charge whom for how much, a tidal wave of unprecedented proportions swells beneath and may soon force publishers to recognize that neither they nor their business models may ultimately prevail in the Internet-based publishing domain. The online newcomers to publishing do “get it,” but large and impressive as it is, Google Print is but one company scanning in books and making them findable through its proprietary technology.

The catalyst for change can be found in the organizations that capitalize on the free, open, and distributed architecture of the Internet itself, like the Open Content Alliance and Europe’s books2ebooks, which, day after day, are scanning in the millions upon millions of books from libraries all over the world, and making them freely available. They are making available to us the books that form our collective recorded world culture since the time of the first book. Searchable. Alterable. Taggable. Query-able. Recombine-able. This is the new abundance, and what are we to make of it?