‘Booksprint’ is a working model for collaborative book authorship, and has since inspired a FLOSS tool called Booki. Its genius is that it takes the proven model of the ‘codesprint’ that open source software communities have used so successfully – to develop huge amounts of code in single intense bursts of focussed collective labour over one week of living, thinking, and working together – and applies it directly to book production. Wireless and F/OSS geek and grassroots technology generalist Thomas Krag introduced Booksprint to the Open Source Publishing Tools workshop as an inverse story about the matter-ing of publishing: “..an outsider’s view of this whole book thing.”

Moving On to Bookness

The Booksprint idea came about while Kraag was working with wire.less.dk, a non-profit he co-founded dedicated to establishing internet infrastructure using open wireless technologies in developing countries. Their company model – “two Danish geeks travelling the world” – was not at all scalable to the wireless networking they wanted to see developing. Limited attention was being given to existing manuals and didactic wikis (“it never occurred to us to ask why anyone else would use our modules when we never read anyone else’s modules”) while the labour involved in ongoing “teach the teacher” sessions was unrealistic. The net at that time in some parts of Africa was also so slow as to not handle simple file downloads of didactic materials. What seemed necessary was a singular authoritative book. It was not possible to put one together from existing quality published material because the book had to be on a free creative commons license, legally open to any translator who wished to translate it, and most importantly, it needed to be able to be legally re-sold locally, so that translators could benefit from their investment in translating it. Kraag realized he was not prepared for the task…

I didn’t want to write a book for 18 months, because at heart I’m pretty lazy, so I called a bunch of friends working on wireless networks that were already coming to a conference in London: “Can we stick around for a week afterwards and write this book?” Some of them said, “Are you crazy?” The reason I thought we could do it is through the existing production model of the codesprint. We sit together and it increases our efficiency. So I found 5000K which was enough for tickets, and to pay someone to go on holidays to Morocco and leave his house to us for a week.

The Conversion of a Genre of Text Labouring into Software Tools

The text still needed to be edited for 6 months, but ‘Wireless Networking in the Developing World’, has had 2 million downloads since and is in its 2nd edition. The process was tedious, using emailed and cut and paste files, proprietary software, and open source outputs. Better tools have developed since 2009 when Adam Hyde began using booksprint for FLOSS manuals and has since fully developed the booksprint model in to Bookie software, a robust and customised collaborative authoring tool. ‘How to Bypass Internet Censorship’ was written with Bookie directly in to the browser, with the crew pressing the “publish” button on the 7th day.

It doesn’t really matter if its not completely polished… it still feels great… The first day you write the table of contents and the index… on friday night you upload it to lulu and its done and it feels so good. a week of all nighters is so much more doable than a year of working on something.

Highlights

Because Booki is open source, you can download it and adapt it as you want. FLOSS’ design has beautifully simple READ and WRITE interfaces and PUBLISH buttons down one side, and a chat section down the right, where you can talk with and share material between other authors writing alongside you remotely. It can handle versioning, tracking authorship (for attribution for different licences), Javi, wiki style sheets that generate html, and a whole bunch of other things. (Check out the van that the Booki crew built for Booki that can drive around and print books!) All the licensing is handled by the site itself and built on Hyde’s own licensing expertise.

Discussion

Krag has not received government or local government funding for his work and instead relies on philanthropic investment since 2002. In the closing discussion, the huge issue of translation software was raised. Simon Worthington of Mute has done research into this and states there really isn’t much, especially not open source. A rare strong example is Pootle. Krag noted FLOSS manuals exists in 5 languages already and can do split views, but this is an area that needs a lot of work. One of the main problems is that professional translators have very established workflow methods – the bottom line is that have to send to translations in Microsoft Word as standard. Femke from OSP mentioned that the EU’s translation department has incredible tools – but only in Microsoft!! One of the exceptions is the Spanish local governments, which do some very good work with open translation, including machine translation – they have some of the same remits that the EU have which means they have to translate large amounts of government text. This may be somewhere to look for modelling solutions.

Floss Manuals Booki available here.

Gary Hall is a Professor of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University, UK. He is author of Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (2008) and Culture in Bits (2002), and co-editor of New Cultural Studies (2006) and Experimenting: Essays With Samuel Weber (2007). His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Angelaki, Cultural Politics, Cultural Studies, and The Oxford Literary Review.

Gary Hall Photographed by Sebastiaan ter Burg at the Unbound Book Conference.

In the ‘Digital Enclosures’ workshop, the panel presented their respective stances on the questions of ‘open access’, copyright laws and business models, in relation to e-books.

Gary Hall explained how the impetus for open access is due to the fact that the scholarly model of publishing is no longer working effectively for publishers. This is largely due to the fact that conventions of academic publishing have been taken over by media conglomerates where the majority of their energies go to music and other media that will generate more profit. Academic writing therefore must sell and be seen as a commodity in order to ensure its success and backing by conglomerates.

Hall mentions various business models for publishing. In the first example, for-profit publishers concentrate mostly on sales. In this case, they tend to sell textbooks, a hot commodity for students which the publishers know will sell because of course requirements. Scholarly-led open access publishing is when the scholar takes the means of production into their own hands. They need not be merely profit oriented. Finally, the third model is when various scholars come together and perform all tasks related to the text. External funding from various sources subsidizes business costs while still ensuring open access books. One of the benefits of this model is the high level of production and editorial standards in the process.

In regard to the question of copyright, Hall states that the main source of funding is from institutions paying employee salaries. Scholars are generally happy to give work away open access. What this means though is that open access cannot be translated to other industries or areas of society such as the Culture Industries. These producers/ creators must be compensated for their work in order for business to thrive. Ultimately, copyright is good for corporations. However many new technologies require new and specific copyright laws (evident when looking at internet piracy).

Is there an economic model for sustainable, long term, open access policy in the humanities? Hall concludes that we don’t know but we must address this not as an all-encompassing “one size fits all, magic bullet answer”. Hall concludes that perhaps digital culture may provide us with an opportunity to think differently about these issues, away from our currently understood notions of individualism and property.

For more info on Gary Hall’s work and research, please visit http://www.garyhall.info/

The Piracy Project is an international publishing and exhibition project exploring the philosophical, legal and practical implications of book piracy and creative modes of reproduction. This project is developed by Andrea Francke, Lynn Harris and Eva Weinmayr. Last week, on the 5th of May, James Bridle gave a speech which was entitled “The New Pierre Menard: digitisation and everything after” – James Bridle is also a speaker on the coming Unbound Book Conference, to be held next week.

James Bridle is a publisher, writer and artist based in the UK. One of his projects is research on Wikipedia in relation to the Iraq War:

This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

So during the Iraq War all the edits on the Wikipedia page devoted to the war were collected and brought together in this huge collection of books. According to Bridle, Wikipedia is a useful subset of the entire internet, and as such a subset of all human culture. In his eyes this is historiography – history as a process – instead of just a set of “facts”: history written by the victors. You can see more on: http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/

In the sessions Future Publishing Industries & Digital Enclosures of the Unbound Book Conference, conventional and digital publishing will be featured subjects. Bridle will speak during the session “Future Publishing Industries“. One of the key questions is how to organize valuable pieces of information, especially in order to serve the next generations. The unconventional notion of the book is changing rapidly. Unknown is what new forms of organizing information do to the concept of “bookness”. What is the digital equivalent of the book as aesthetic object? How will new players, like the companies: Amazon, Google & Apple influence the field?

For more information see: http://www.art-agenda.com/shows/and-publishing-announces-the-piracy-lectures/

The behemoth has suffered a major drawback. Judge Denny Chin on 22 March rejected Google’s plan to pay a legal settlement of $125 million to authors and publishers, a deal first made in 2005 with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. Judge Denny Chin deemed the settlement unfair for granting Google the right to profit from books without copyright owners’ permission.

While the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers are pro-Google, the project also faces strong opposition. Commonly heard complaints include protests that Google would have exclusive rights to profit from millions of orphan works whose right holders can’t be found. Others balk that no other company would be able to build a comparable library, allowing Google free reign to charge high prices for its collection. And some critics believe the exclusive access to millions of books would assist Google’s tight grip on Internet search. Among the opponents are Amazon, Microsoft, academics, authors, copyright experts, the Justice Department and foreign governments.

In favour of Google’s digital library

What do the Google allies say about the ruling? One of Wired’s blogs countered any optimism, saying “that celebration is a shame, because the world will be poorer for the decision,” while only the copyright whiners have won out. The New York Times opines the missed chance for a universal library: “Google had gotten closer to the elusive goal than anyone else.”

“It is quite disappointing because there isn’t something better in the wings,” said Michael A. Keller, the university librarian at Stanford, one of the universities that allowed Google to scan its books. Pail Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild still has hope: “The judge did expressly leave the door open for a revised settlement.” Also some publishers are disappointed by the decision but believe it provides clear guidance on how the settlement can be approved. Among the disappointed publishers is John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, speaking on behalf of his ilk, which included Penguin Group USA, McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons. “The publisher plaintiffs are prepared to enter into a narrower settlement along those lines to take advantage of its groundbreaking opportunities. (…)We hope the other parties will do so as well.”

And what does Google say? “We will continue to stay engaged and try to be supportive.” Hilary Ware, managing counsel at Google, believes that the decision was “clearly disappointing,” explaining: “Like many others, we believe this agreement has the potential to open up access to millions of books that are currently hard to find in the U.S. today.”

Against Google’s digital library

And what do the opponents say? Judge Denny Chin decided Google’s agreement was “not fair, adequate and reasonable.” Gina Talamona, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said in a statement that the court had reached the “right result.”

“Even though it is efficient for Google to make all the books available, the orphan works and unclaimed books problem should be addressed by Congress, not by the private settlement of a lawsuit.” said Pamela Samuelson, a copyright expert at the University of California. The Cornell Daily Sun agrees: “A universal library has unlimited potential, but not if one person holds the strings.” Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University Library, sees it as a chance to build a public good, outside the clutches of a private company, “an opportunity for those of us who care about creating a noncommercial public digital library to get on with it.”

The opponents of the Google Book project want to create a non commercial universal digital library called the Digital Public Library of America. This effort counts many supporters:  librarians from major universities, officials from the National Archives and the Library of Congress and some of the largest philanthropic foundations.

The responses in favour of Google focuses mainly on the advantages of a digital library, and some still have hope for the Google Book project. The opponents of Google agree with the advantages of a universal digital library but do not believe Google is suited for the job. Whatever the responses may be, if Google decides to appeal, we’ll have to wait and see which side brings enough ammunition to settle a project that seems inevitable in any case. For now Google is strong-armed by laws that need revision anyway (copyright), but the future digital library should keep the most important goal in mind: serving the public.