I’ve spent a couple of intellectually stimulating days with the SFU Master of Publishing students this week. I’m an alumni of the program and was invited to chat with the technology class. The discussion Monday was on this article by J. Esposito called “The Processed Book”.
It’s interesting from a theoretical point of view. The processed book is defined as the electronic text of a work that is published in a network environment. It acts kind of like a wiki, whereby users can annotate the text or run scripts off the text to generate reports on patterns, such as word frequency. The original text remains intact, but the user can add on.
The five aspects of a processed book are described at length in the article but their use or validity is unexamined. The rest of this post is about my thoughts on the article and the author’s statements. Feel free to bail out now.
Here’s my summary of the five aspects of the processed book:
1. book as portal: User is able to click through to other source info, i.e., a dictionary, footnotes, bibliographies.
2. book as self-referencing text: Computer is able to generate for the user reports on word frequencies, for example, or develop thought clouds or other patterns in the text.
3. book as platform: The book can “call” other resources, for example, a mention of Ariel Sharon could link to a set of web sites with further information. I’m not clear on the difference between portal and platform here, but the idea is book as platform eliminates the need to investigate other source materials independently.
4. book as machine component: Book is written for a machine-audience, is readable by search engines, could generate sales data and future sales predictions and other reports based on word frequencies or popularity of similar texts.
5. book as network node: The processed book is plugged into a network–a network that equals all the parts, such as the tools or add-on services–i.e., word frequency reports–which make the processed book appear more valuable than a regular ebook, which does not allow the user to annotate the text or run reports off the text.
There are a couple of huge holes with this article but I understand and see the value in theory. Scholarly research could benefit from this type of model. Various contributors to scientific journals, for example, could contribute research or peer review reports. I also see an application for text in this format for publishers who produce electronic catalogues. A team of sales reps could annotate book descriptions with their sales handles or key points they want to express to a client.
But the holes. The holes.
Who will invest the resources into producing a processed book? What’s the business case for doing so? What value does a processed book really offer to a user?
I kept thinking of Neil Postman while reading this article–“what is the problem this technology is trying to solve?” Why do we attempt to turn human nature into an efficient, countable machine?
I thoroughly enjoyed the high level discussion this article generated about ebooks and processed books, user/reader experience, the future of books in general. In that respect, this article does it’s job. It generates discussion.
There are a couple of authoritative statements in the article that are unaddressed, mind you. Rhetorical glissades, as I like to call them. Rhetorical glissades are those wide-sweeping statements humans like to make, those unqualified or unquantified statements, like “property crime is on the rise.” Oh yes, we think. Heard something about that in the news … must be true.
So here are the things I take issue with in the article:
Esposito describes the traditional notion of a book as the “primal book”, an embodiment of a thought, generally by one author, typically bound in a physical package or 4″ x 6″ or 7″ x 9″. What data supports this? Are there are more books by single authors than by multiple authors? Are most books printed 4×6 or 7×9?
Esposito, in pitching the value of book as portal, suggests that in a processed book you could look up every entry in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Who determines what source materials are referenced? Can there ever be an unbiased selection? Would it ever be necessary to look up every entry? Does that really provide value?
In book as platform, Esposito says that a book placed in a library’s collection has the potential to cannibalize retail sales. What? Why would anyone think that library sales cannibalize retail sales? Where’s the data to support that notion?
In book as machine component, he suggests that text to speech technology could give the reader of a processed book the choice of reading or listening and that TTS could destroy the $2 billion US audio book business as the rights to a book’s text and audio will converge. Really? Would that happen? I don’t know anyone who’d like to listen to the Bell Mobility computerized sales agent–putting em-pha-sis on the right syl-la-bles–read them a novel vs. a person reading with spirit and intonations.
He also suggests that publishers could make predictive decisions about what to publish based on book sales or titles with popular word frequencies. Would publishers really use that type of data to drive decisions? Think of all the Da Vinci Code by-products that already exist, do we want to replicate that on a larger scale?
Ok, so it goes on like this, there are more things to pick apart, and of course I’ve done exactly what Esposito has done and I have not linked to the pages in the article with these references or linked to supporting data for my queries. Sloppy academic, that I am. I’d like to go back and do that for you so my arguments are solid but the article appears all on one page and I have no clue how you reference quotes within a long scrollable web page. Here’s the article link again. And, blog-time is Monique time. I don’t want to interfere with my work-life balance to debate the merits or demerits of this article any longer than I already have.
I’ll leave you with this parting quote from the article, the ultimate goal of the processed book is “to inform a generation of robots, not to make the world more machine-like but to make machines more human.”
I’m sure there are many good reasons to do that, and many examples of how that could work for books, but they’re not leaping out at me. If you made it this far down the ramble, please let me know if you have any follow up thoughts. Tap the inner academic. Go for it!