LJNDawson

Tools of Change 2013: You Must Go On, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

As usual, some themes grew out of this TOC conference – this seems to happen every year. And of course, it varies from person to person, so I can only speak from my own perspective, and perhaps there’s a little wishful thinking there as well.

But the fact that the World Wide Web Consortium not only had a concurrent conference about the Web and ebooks, but W3C members also attended regular TOC sessions (and gave a keynote) spoke very loudly to me. And it was a one-way conversation.

I do not see very many book industry people approaching the Web. But the Web is certainly approaching the book industry. It’s not enough to digitize text, wrap it in DRM, and sell it. The Web demands more than a silo’d experience. It demands interconnectivity. Links. Since the inception of the Web, content of all kinds has not simply been digitized, but contextualized by open-ended conversations with other content. An ebook is a closed system. The Web is open – and when it encounters a closed system, it tends to find ways to open it.

The question is whether that opening happens with or without publishers. And that is the elephant in the room.

That elephant was very firmly in the room during my “Open Book” presentation on Wednesday. It was a short talk, making some short points – that there has been explosive growth in published text over the last 14 years. That putting all that text on paper is not scaleable as a business. That digitizing it is scaleable, but invokes the problem of discovery. That discovery is best enabled by interoperability and structured markup. And if publishers are not making their own texts discoverable, someone else will.

Presumably publishers are publishing because what they are publishing has value. The fact that someone else perceives that value and makes the content more valuable is – again, presumably – a good thing.

The implication, however, is unnerving to traditional publishers. Opening up content – willingly or unwillingly – means a lack of control of that content. And dialing back “control” to mere “participation” is an idea that’s extremely tough for traditional publishers to get comfortable with. For 500 years, publishers have been broadcasting, not conversing. But the Web is a conversation.

The response to my talk was indicative of this discomfort. In a way, I was satisfied with the response because it confirmed for me the difficulties that traditional publishers are having. I was also saddened by it, of course. But those emotions don’t get us very far. What does get us far is simply putting one foot in front of the other, and continuing. It’s not romantic, but it’s movement. And it’s how real progress happens.

Tools of Change 2013: Some Fun

Tools of Change always starts out with Book^2, an unconference founded by Chris Kubica, Ami Greko, and Kat Meyer. Stewart Cauley captured the very best moment:

Why, yes, that is my Scamp sitting next to me. She stayed throughout the entire event, despite the fact that she had two weeks’ allowance burning a hole in her pocket and we were in Soho. And she had quite a bit to say:

Scamp is of the opinion that book publishing is now unnecessarily complicated. #Book2

— ljndawson (@ljndawson) February 10, 2013

And this:

@pablod @ljndawson My fave President Scamp quote is ‘I can’t believe you people think talking about this stuff is fun.’ #book2

— Kate Pullinger (@katepullinger) February 10, 2013

Things really got kicking the next day in the W3C Ebook conference, which I will write about in a bit. What really struck me about W3C’s involvement is this: Whether book publishing plays along or not, the web wants books. I felt very heartened after leaving the sessions on Monday.

Tuesday was Author (R)evolution Day – Kristin McLean’s all-day workshop helping authors understand the traditional publishing landscape as well as some of the disruptions the landscape is experiencing. I was really struck by the incisiveness of the questions – it’s apparent to me that authors have been kept in the dark about how publishing works for far too long.

And Pablo Francisco Arrieta drew this picture of me as an alien, which I immediately made my Twitter avatar:

On Wednesday, I gave a presentation about marking up ebooks with semantic tags, just to introduce the idea to the book publishing community. Amazingly, Ivan Herman, who directs the W3C’s semantic web efforts, attended – both he and Tzviya Siegman of Wiley were phenomenally helpful. Last night, Tzviya sent me a TOC photo, which India Amos immediately turned into a LOLLaura:

Thursday, Pat Payton, Carl Kulo and I led an “Ask Me Anything” session, which was great fun and a new twist on Bowker’s traditional presentation methods.

It may be the weekend before I can digest all my takeaways from this conference, but it was phenomenal this year.

Data Points And Spaces

In my resolution-keeping, I’ve been doing some data collection. As I mentioned, I’m using a program called “Perfect Diet Tracker” – ugh, how I hate the name, but the app is really good – to track what I consume and what I expend. I actually have “numbers time” every day where I also do Quicken – tracking is tracking, after all.

What has struck me, in all this extremely incremental data entry, is that any single data point is not all that valuable. What’s valuable is the relationship of multiple data points to one another. It’s a lesson I keep learning. And it’s a good thing to keep in mind as new sites launch before gathering a meaningful data set. To a certain degree, metadata’s a commodity. The relationship of one set of metadata to another is the product or service.

Of course, this is why I feel so strongly about the semantic web. It’s in its infancy – and toddlerhood is not much prettier – but over time it will prove meaningful. Helpful, even.

But what’s even more fascinating, in a way, is what’s NOT there. Yet. We can only gather data that’s been recorded. So much hasn’t. And when we finally do amass a corpus of data that we can blend with our existing data, the results can be surprising – even gratifying to some.