[FM Discuss] federated publishing

[adam]

hi,

I am presenting Booki and FM at the Frankfurt book fair and put together 
a text as a starting point of what I wanted to say...included 
below...any comments/critique welcome...

adam


Federated Publishing
Instead of talking about new book publishing models and moving 
incrementally within or slightly without its walls lets try something 
else, place ourselves in a space completely *inside* the space where 
content is as far as feasibly possible free (libre) - one such space for 
this I would like to call 'federated publishing'.

Federated Publishing is not a 'model' it is in fact a network of models 
- enabling multiple approaches of content production, distribution and 
consumption. It is a space enabled by four core elements - digitally 
networked corpora, interoperable libre licensed content, federated open 
book production and 'publishing' platforms, and people. It is a space 
that enables traditional established book production techniques but 
fuels new approaches which are radically different - a space where books 
have no authors, attribution is not really anything anyone cares about, 
quality is high, books live - constantly updated and improved, books 
magically migrate across languages, high quality text books are produced 
in exceedingly short times measured in minutes, hours or days, books 
have no publisher but multiple channels and multiple contexts, content 
is shifted between contexts rapidly and easily, people get paid, 
reputations get made, economies exist.

This is not pie in the sky. This exists now. FLOSS Manuals has 
inadvertently found itself tinkering inside of publishing for the past 5 
years. We have broken many established practices because we didn't know 
any better. We have developed tools that don't imagine a future but were 
built to provide sensible pathways to what we wanted to achieve. We now 
surface after 5 years of this, look around and realise we are 
simultaneously inside and outside publishing. We articulate this as 
'Federated Publishing'.

Federated Publishing is a term born from Federated Social Network 
jargon, which itself is born out of a need to transform proprietary 
network services into a modern Free Software critique. Federated 
Publishing is not in itself a critique, it is an active and vibrant 
practice - but it is born from this ideological legacy.

Publishing is trying to invent a new proprietary future. This 
proprietorship is to be taken in the broadest possible understanding. It 
is not just a question of closed copyright finding new distribution 
formats and economic models, it is a question of domain branding 
strategies within free culture and the unwillingness to make content 
interoperable on a technical, legal, or social cultural level.

We are tied to the need to tie ourselves to the content we produce. We 
enable the commit bit whenever we can by default and it is a tiring and 
resource consuming strategy that retards the development of culture and 
knowledge.

Federated Publishing is a future we are working in now at FLOSS Manuals. 
We actively encourage anyone to make a book, chapter, edit. We encourage 
anyone to fork a book, take it to their own domain, translate it, reuse 
it, break it, voice multiple discordant positions and concerns within 
the same covers, break the use of 'I' as a dominant identifier for a 
single individual author, take the book without changing a word and make 
your a million. No problems.

We aim to generate federated interoperable corpora enabled by common 
sense technology and an increasing consciousness that a book is 'ours' 
to do as 'I', you, them, or we want. We are starting with free manuals 
and aim to provide an example of what is possible within and between 
domains.

We currently work like this. All the content is free, we use one license 
to increase interoperability and we discourage talk of licenses to 
encourage productivity, we provide all the tools we make for free and 
make it easy for you to take anything you want from us. Our website 
templates, books, community, platform...whatever you like.

In this environment books transform - they migrate across contexts, they 
are translated, they are kept alive, they are used the world over to 
help people learn about free software, they are of extremely good 
quality, they provide economies for those that wish to pursue the 
seemingly radical practices.

Sound impossible to have an economy here? Another free culture 
revolution without a strategy to pay the rent? Consider Marshall 
McLuhans astonishing vision :

“Instead of going out and buying a packaged book of which there have 
been five thousand copies printed, you will go to the telephone, 
describe your interests, your needs, your problems … and they at once 
Xerox with the help of computers from libraries all over the world, all 
the latest material for you personally, not as something to be put out 
on a bookshelf.  They send you the package as a direct personal service. 
  This is where we’re heading under electronic conditions.  Products 
increasingly are becoming services.”

That was not a vision of the internet, it is a vision of the book. The 
internet does not work like that. Books can. This is the way I have paid 
my rent for the last two years. By making books that are an accumulation 
of everything that you need in a book. There is one major difference and 
something that Marshall Mcluhan may not have interwined into this thread 
- the net has brought social production networks to a scale that the 
person on the other end of McLuhans phone line is an asynchronous 
network of people you never met, and it is you. You make books with 
others, you decide what a book is and what goes in it, others add ideas 
and content that either you cant produce or cant produce in time. 100% 
original source books are created in days. Others in minutes.

People pay for that. They pay for you to help them do that. It is the 
beginning of Federated Publishing services, it is the end of nothing.










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--
Adam Hyde
Founder, FLOSS Manuals
Project Manager, Booki
Book Sprint Facilitator
mobile :+ 49 177 4935122
identi.ca : @eset
booki.flossmanuals.net : @adam

http://www.flossmanuals.net
http://www.booki.cc
http://www.booksprints.net