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.

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.