This makes me wonder how much of this model is applicable to publishing. There are already some entries into this, such as Harper Collins’ Authonomy, Smashwords, CompletelyNovel, Amazon’s CreateSpace. I haven’t seen any yet, though, that quite come close to the level of participation, excitement, and cool/hip level as Threadless. But I think it’s possible, and even probable, that someone will, sooner rather than later.

In the academic space, I find that Common Ground publishing, which runs the International Journal of the Book, has an interesting business model and process. They run ~15 conferences, on subjects in the humanities and science, each with an associated journal. When you present at one of their conferences, as I did in October, you receive a year’s access to the associated journal, and you can submit an academic paper to the journal. When you submit your paper through the journal’s peer review process, you also agree to peer review two to three papers for the journal. Common Ground also is able to implement a striking balance between technology (everything is submitted and approved online) and personal touch (you always have a sense that there are real people involved). They also encourage and offer opportunities for collaboration and participation.

My article on “Innovation and the Future of e-Books” was recently published in The International Journal of the Book. My premise is that the development and acceptance of e-books today parallels incunabula in the 15th century. The paper considers three examples of innovative e-books to illustrate the potential and pitfalls of electronic publications. This peer-reviewed paper is now available on the RAND web site (free download):
http://www.rand.org/pubs/reprints/RP1385/

What do you look at online? Speaking for myself, my surfing day is divided between the two wings of Internet content, almost in a parody of CNN’s old Crossfire show: sites such as that of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (on the Right), but also sites such as Slashdot.org and Publishing 2.0 (on the Left). Still and all, these choices seem too stark, out of touch with the reality of how content gets created and brought to our attention. Unlike computers, the world of content (and the society that creates it) is not binary. The choice between UGC and editorial publishing is not a real one.

One would be hard pressed to find a traditional publishing form that is not experimenting in some way with the tools of what has become known as Web 2.0. Many old-line newspapers now sport an expanded stable of columnists, but they are called bloggers and appear online exclusively. Returning to The New York Times, I was surprised to see myself now waiting as eagerly for new posts by blogger Stanley Fish as I have long waited for the columns of Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, and David Brooks. Stories now routinely come with a “comments” section, which typically undergoes a wee bit of moderation to weed out commercial messages, pornography, and overly exuberant spirits. Traditional book publishers now post sections, and in some instances the entire text, of their publications online to stimulate book purchases; not unusually, these product samples are accompanied by user comments. As Bob Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book likes to point out, content inevitably will be embedded in a conversation, for which the online medium has clear advantages over print. The original publication may often be an instance of editorial publishing, but the commentary is likely to be UGC. The binary split is disappearing; just about everything now is a hybrid.

Over on the UGC side, there are a great number of techniques to refine the raw output of the solitary user. Online communities vote on the merits of a particular post almost as though content were running for office. To get a comment to the top of the pile at Digg is a challenge. It helps to have been around a bit and to know how the game is played. On Wikipedia every new contribution goes through a series of checks, which attempt to weed out fraud, self-interest, simple knuckleheadedness, and pranks. It is probably no longer enough to say that content may be user-generated; increasingly it is community-refined.

Of particular interest to me is what I will call “membership publishing,” an umbrella term for the phenomenon of “provostial publishing,” which serves as the title of this post. We can imagine a club or community that seeks to qualify its members. Not everyone gets into the Rotary Club or the Boy Scouts; very few have a chance to become members of elite institutions such as Amherst or Cornell. A membership community has a gatekeeping committee and attempts to ensure that all who are invited to join are distinguished representatives. In the academic community (the publishing segment that most interests me) the iconic gatekeeper is the provost, among whose many tasks is the appointment of faculty. While there are always some who will challenge a provost’s decisions, the merits of the faculty speak for the institution as a whole. Insofar as the faculty serves as authors, their publications represent the provost’s choices.

With the growth of institutional repositories, which aim to collect the output of research faculty, a new model of publishing is emerging. It would be wrong to think of the output of research faculty in the same way that we think of the comments on Digg or even in Wikipedia. Anyone can contribute to Digg, but very, very few can place a document into the repository at MIT. Research faculty are experts; some of the contributors to Wikipedia may be experts as well, but there is no gatekeeper, no provost, to vouch for them. So this is UGC, but it is expert UGC.

What it is not, except in special instances, is an aspect of editorial publishing. Faculty may deposit preprints, working papers, conference presentations, whatever into an institutional repository, but it is entirely possible that no editor has reviewed the material first. (There are also instances where the faculty deposits papers after they have gone through traditional peer review by a journal or book publisher, so-called Gold Open Access publishing.) If the faculty is a community of experts, their output is likely to be superior to that of anyone with an opinion and a keyboard. On the other hand, if the faculty deposits material that has not gone through traditional editorial procedures, then their work has not had the benefit of those procedures–assuming, of course, that one values the work of editors and peer review, as most members of the academic community do.

Provostial publishing, then, is publishing where a gatekeeper, in this case the provost, chooses the authors but does not choose the works. Traditional editorial publishing is where an editor chooses the work. In UGC the choice of the author is made by the author him or herself–but this is not much of a choice, as we all believe our own thoughts are worth something. The more important choice for UGC is one of venue: Do I post this to my Facebook friends? to Digg? to Slashdot? to my blog?

We are likely to see a huge surge in provostial publishing in the years ahead. Part of this is simply a function of the growth in research: all that research will yield outputs. Another part is the increase in the number and sophistication of institutional repositories and also the policies that govern them, which in some instances include mandates (by the provost’s office, of course) for faculty to deposit papers. More and more publications will bear the brand not of traditional publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Random House) but of parent institutions (Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago). These brands will come to compete in new ways in the marketplace, likely crowding out brands of lesser distinction.

“Could you imagine a model where you pay $X/month for access to an unlimited number of books? It’s never going to happen in the print world but I think this could be the killer app for the Kindle, a world where manufacturing and distribution costs are zero. Access to every single book in the entire Kindle library could be yours for a monthly fee. Assuming the monthly fee is reasonable this could be the model that really kick-starts the e-book industry.

“How would publishers and authors get paid in this model? One option is to go by pageviews. Although the capability doesn’t exist in Kindle 1.0, there’s no reason version 2.0 couldn’t be built to track pageviews of every book downloaded and read. At the end of the month the device could upload the customer’s viewing history back to Amazon so that the monthly fee could be split among the publishers whose products were downloaded and read. Publishers would then pay authors their contractual share based on that same data.”

As Wikert describes this scenario, it evokes recollection of the voluntary collective licensing scheme Jeffrey Toobin wrote about in his New Yorker article, Google’s Moon Shot, as a possible direction for a settlement between Google and the AAP, with the additional element described here of the authors’ share being accounted for through contractual revenue sharing (for rights-determined content). One can imagine scenarios where this becomes a dominant licensing model for electronic access. Clearly it could apply equally well to both Amazon and Google, or for that matter any enterprise that controlled access to large or otherwise sufficiently viable digital text collections.

What Doctorow doesn’t say, however, is that if the Kindle or its ilk (meaning useful ebook devices) becomes successful, Doctorow is going to have to come up with a new marketing trick.

Some background is in order. As a founding contributor of Boing Boing, frequent online poster, and established author of science fiction, Doctorow is something of an Internet celebrity. He is also a frequent commentator on that all-absorbing subject, How the Web is Intended to Work. And one way it works, he says, using his own fiction-writing as an example, is as a promotional medium for hardcopy books. Doctorow was among the first to experiment putting the entire text of a book online for people to sample, with the aim of then having that sampling drive the sale of hardcopy. It works for him; his sales are up. And, I should add, for every single example of similar online product sampling I have been able to study, it has worked as well. Free text on the Internet sells hardcopy books. There may be exceptions to this among reference titles (e.g., cookbooks, dictionaries), where viewing a short entry online may sate a reader, but generally, Doctorow is onto something, and he has personally profited from it.

Two important limitations to this marketing tactic, however. Since few current book-length works are available online at no cost, Doctorow’s free books are something of a novelty. If everyone took Doctorow’s advice and made the full texts of books available for free online, however, it would require greater and greater effort to call attention to individual titles: free online texts may drive hardcopy sales, but you have to find the online texts first. Thus if everyone followed Doctorow’s lead, few or none would prosper. Doctorow might have to go back to trying to get an appearance on Oprah.

More fundamentally, however, the great gamble that Doctorow is making is that the reading of a digital text will always be inferior to the reading of hardcopy. Print is better than digital formats for most people, especially those who read what have come to be called “long-form works,” which is supposed to call to mind something that looks like and is structured like a novel, meaning 200-1,000 pages long and organized more or less linearly. Sample a longish book online, sure, but read it all the way through? Not for most of us. Thus Doctorow’s business model: post texts in a “disergonomic” manner online and invite readers to get the better format through Amazon or your local bookstore.

Kindle and the Sony reader and some other devices, not to mention the many on their way, are making a different bargain, however: they propose that reading a digital text could be as satisfying as reading hardcopy; and on top of that, you get all the bells and whistles (search, bookmarking, etc.) that are peculiar to digital forms. Now we post the full text of a book online for free. Do we read it through a browser? Probably not. Instead we download it to our ebook device, where the text is displayed in a highly satisfying manner.

Thus, as ebooks get better (and Kindle is very good, if not what many observers were hoping for) the opportunity to use online texts to market hardcopy versions of the same books disappears. Doctorow needs a new marketing plan; he is battling with the giant behemoth of Amazon, IT innovator and marketer extraordinaire.

There is an intriguing implication here. Free text (also called Open Access content) is becoming more plentiful for a number of reasons, and one of them is the canny ability of marketers (Doctorow included) to begin to use OA as a marketing tool for other formats or services. Widespread use of ebooks may thus put downward pressure on the growth of OA texts, as the open content may come to be viewed as cannibalizing sales rather than promoting them.

Doctorow may or may not be aware that if many or most writers and publishers followed his lead, he might have to find another way to earn a living. It is a curious position to be in: To have the distinction of being a leader, but having a personal interest in having no one follow.

But I, at any rate, wish to follow, at least part of the distance. The noise Doctorow has made about himself and the virtues of free online texts has made me want to read one of his science fiction novels. So I am now browsing the used bookstores near my home. Buying a used copy is an article of faith, as it would be inappropriate for any money to find its way back to the author or publisher. Free means free. Cory Doctorow taught me this.