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.

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?

I found this fascinating quote today:

I’ve given a few talks on why these new tools are failing to catch on — here’s an early one given at a publishers meeting, and a later one given to an audience of scientists.  The short answer, if you don’t want to read my lengthy posts, is that very few, if any of the new online scholarly tools give benefits that outweigh the costs in time and effort.  Web 2.0 is all about huge timesinks, and so far, the tools aren’t justifying the effort they require.  Our readers are busy people — I’ve never met a single successful scientist with extra time on his hands.  They don’t want to spend huge chunks of their week filtering information or chatting online with strangers. I am at heart a technophile, and I love playing with these new tools, and I’ll let you know when I find useful ones like GoPubMed, and I’ll poke holes in others, like online reference managers.David Crotty under, The Scholarly Kitchen

…And what this says to me is that, while the epublishing tools are growing in breadth and complexity faster than any single human can monitor, for now, they are not really necessary to our work.  The current generation of scientists and thinkers, all of us relative newcomers to the Web, is spoiled by rich and ready access to a fertile thought environment that spans the tangible and the virtual, the old and the new — living, breathing colleagues, printed literature, terrestrial lab/classroom spaces, plus the new web tools. No wonder those new web tools seem superfluous! But if and when any of the first three categories of communication become unavailable to us for whatever reason–colleagues retiring, libraries closing, publishers going out of business, political upheavals making travel unreasonable — then web tools may become indispensable, may supplant our familiar terrestrial forms of communication, and then we will likely see rapid adoption of said tools, or other forms of species adaptation.

You should read the whole article.