The first, Europe Between Oceans, by the renowned archaeologist Barry Cunliffe, is a masterful work, combining history, archaeology, geography, anthropology, and a smorgasbord of other disciplines in explaining the transformation of human culture and society in Europe from prehistoric to the dawn of the modern, encompassing a ten thousand year period from 9,000 B.C. to 1,000 A.D. Cunliffe writes with erudition and clarity, never oversimplifying, but without the befuddling writing designed more to impressed than to illuminate that is so common in academic circles. The publisher, Yale University Press, is clearly at the top of its game here: the layout is splendid, with plenty of pleasing white space, yet full of helpful maps, photos, and charts. Europe Between Oceans covers much familiar ground, but drawing from the latest research in a multitude of disciplines it provides strikingly new insights.

The second is Lapham’s Quarterly, a literary journal edited and published by former Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham. I wasn’t enough in the cognoscenti, I’m sorry to say, to get on board for the first issue, nevertheless I’d learned of the journal’s existence by the second issue, had subscribed by the third, and purchased a gift subscription for my parents by the fourth. Published quarterly, each issue covers a theme—thus far War, Money, Nature, Learning, Eros, and the current issue, Crimes and Punishments. Lapham mixes and mashes genres and primary sources in his investigation of each theme, from ancient to modern, employing excerpts of stories, essays, poetry, art, charts, and photography. Imagine Herodotus and Lazarillo de Tormes slapping high-fives to Franz Kafka and Raymond Chandler because they made it into the latest issue. Reading Lapham’s is like being an observer to the musings of an accomplished collector gripped by bibliomancy during an extended weekend visit to his abode.

Both of these works, at the apex of modern publishing, might cause one to wonder how they could possibly be improved upon in electronic form. Surely they prove the point that e-books could never fully replace print. And yet, and yet…

Jumping just a bit into the future, let’s grab our podkinfliptop, with its color touch screen and multimedia capabilities, and run. Placing the cursor next to an unfamiliar term in Cunliffe’s book, like Bosphorus, brings up its definition. Clicking on the place-name of Tyre deploys Google Earth. Maps of migrations or empires, instead of static, depict the spread and flow over time. Instead of a single picture depicting the ancient city of Miletos, or a bronze warrior god from the 12th century, a gallery of photos is embedded in the e-text. Links lead to further scholarship or modules about topics of particular interest to the reader. Cunliffe’s tome is a big book, nearly too hefty to curl up in bed with comfortably for a nice reading session, but in its e-format it poses no problem on the podkinfliptop, which you read while touring the Aegean region with your family. At the ruins of the Byzantine fortress in Anadolu Kavagi, you take a striking photo and instantly upload the photo to the book’s gallery.

With Lapham’s, the electronic version might explore the theme over the course of a few months with a daily or weekly segment, loaded automatically onto the device, instead of a quarterly publication. Links abound between and among volumes; users add links to other content in order to further illuminate the theme, sharing the links with other users. The podkinfliptop version includes old newsreels, film segments, Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” or Johnny Cash at Folsom, a poem read by its author.

All of these capabilities exist today, in one form or another. A central question is, of course, who pays for all of this? I’m not optimistic that many publishers can, with a positive ROI, create both a beautifully laid out print version and a link- and multimedia-rich electronic version, but nor is it yet clear that many electronic-only publications are financially viable. As I point out in my recent article, larger publishers like Cengage or Pearson certainly have the resources to create resource-rich electronic publications for higher education, and a number of non-profit initiatives, like Connexions or Yale Books Unbound, are underway. But while readers may not balk at forking over $35 for the beautiful hardcover Europe Between the Oceans, customers seem to expect a lower price for electronic versions. Perhaps instead of selling 20,000 copies at $30.00 each of the hardcover, and dealing with returns, YUP could sell 250,000 copies at $10.00 of the e-version. Lapham’s could get a larger number of subscribers at a lower price, or offer it free under a government grant, or corporate or foundation sponsorship. The “publisher” provides the platform and content, encouraging the community to contribute additional links and resources, building on the “book.” I have to remain optimistic that this type of publishing can survive and prosper in the digital age. The University of Michigan Press seems to be betting on it.

When Amazon started out, we knew little of all the things Amazon subsequently taught us, things like the ease of ecommerce, the technology of user authentication and online processing of credit cards, the value of superb customer service, and that unique characteristic of the Web, the ability to create a storefront that could claim to hold truly comprehensive inventory in a particular domain.  While not all organizations do these things as well as Amazon today, and none do them better, the fact is that Amazon has taught us well:  more and more of what Amazon does is now available to rivals.  It is no longer necessary to build your own shopping cart, and if you are stumped by the risks involved in taking an order by credit card, there are vendors lined up to take this problem off your hands.  The gap is closing, and for Amazon to stay ahead of the pack, it must continue to innovate at a breathtaking clip.

Unfortunately for Amazon, other Web services are coming up with comparable innovations.  Amazon built a community around its offerings, but the Amazon community is nothing compared to those found at MySpace, Digg, or Facebook.  And Amazon created what may be the first credible ebook device, the Kindle, but already the possibility of reading etexts on the iPod and iPhone is making the Kindle seem like an unlikely winner.  We can imagine a Dr. Frankenstein of ecommerce rummaging in the graveyard for body parts to cobble into the monster that will resemble nothing so much as Amazon:  A second-best shipping system, a second-best shopping cart, a second-best print-on-demand service–but in the end, a credible alternative to Amazon’s systems:  not good, but good enough.

Where Amazon continues to trump all pretenders is in the breadth of its inventory–The World’s Largest Bookstore was its original claim.  It would be very, very hard to replicate this inventory (or, rather, the online catalogue that represents that inventory, which may be warehoused at Amazon or at Amazon’s many vendors).  It may no longer be necessary to catalogue and support all titles, however, if a new online merchant could dominate a particular subject area.  Mike Shatzkin has argued persuasively that the infrastructure of online bookselling marks the end of general trade publishers, which will be replaced with “verticals” in particular fields, abetted by tapping into online communities built around particular topics.  In time the science fiction vertical or the ancient history vertical or any number of other subject-specific sites could incorporate ecommerce activity and pressure Amazon at the edge of empire, relying on the intensity of community involvement to strengthen their marketing proposition vis-a-vis the industry leader.  Amazon tries to be all things to all people, but a niche site must simply be everything to a self-defined group of people.  The intensity of focus becomes the merchandising weapon of choice.

It is astonishing to think of how little a new, topically-based ecommerce site would have to do for itself.  Inventory can be drawn from Ingram or Baker & Taylor; ecommerce software can now be purchased off the shelf; fulfillment (once a big headache for warehouses that were not set up to handle orders to individuals) now has several suppliers; metadata for catalogue entries supporting the ONIX standard can be sent from publishers to the new site; and so on.  Part of Amazon’s position at the head of the pack derived from its willingness to invent new infrastructure and build it.  Now the world of ecommerce is being disaggregated, and the vertically integrated Amazon is beginning to look like it was built for an earlier era.

These thoughts, and the controlling metaphor, were prompted by a recent experience in my local, beloved used-book store.  I wandered among the idiosyncratically organized stock, the stacks of books of all description, the book spines whose lettering had worn away:  paradise.  There on a shelf I spotted the two-volume Modern Library edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  I hesitated before picking up the books and carrying them to the cash register, but I had promised myself to read Gibbon before I died.  I joked with the cashier that she wouldn’t see me for a long time because I had a very long book to read first.  She said that I would have to read quickly, as the store would close in a month.

Among other causes, Amazon had helped to put that store out of business.  But the proprietor has already begun his next venture, in online bookselling.  He is not himself a threat to Amazon (some of what he will do will be with Amazon’s many services), but he is one of many people and companies gradually coming to terms with the behemoth and finding new ways to find a customer, turn a profit.  It is an army of thousands and they are starting new ventures, testing new value propositions.  It could be said that if any of them achieve anything of importance, Amazon will simply buy them.  But Amazon can’t buy everything:  unlike the imaginative space opened up by a book, the balance sheet of even an imperial corporation is not infinitely extensible.

Is Amazon’s weakness its growing arrogance?  Perhaps.  Speak to the vendors who are now struggling with Amazon’s new Vendor Central system and you will find countless volunteers ready to bring down the tyrant.  Or perhaps Amazon, seeing the success of the iPhone and Stanza ebook reader, is getting desperate, as was suggested by one individual (not cited by name here as the comment was made in a private mailgroup); and this desperation has resulted in Amazon’s new insistence that it will only sell ebooks in the Kindle format.  Amazon would have us believe that resistance is futile, but the growing number of publishers studying alternatives to the Kindle suggest otherwise.

Amazon’s decline will come about because it will not be able to monopolize ebook distribution with the Kindle; because new business models (mostly based on subscription sales of aggregated content to consumers, not unlike Safari Books and similar in form to NetFlix) will challenge Amazon’s operating philosophy; because social networks organized around special interests will help to solve the problem of bringing traffic to a new or series of new online stores; because so many of the pieces necessary for an ecommerce site are available at modest cost from multiple vendors; and because many people are motivated to storm the barricades, whether for profit or just for the hell of it.

Amazon will not go quietly or quickly.  It is a great company and no stranger to risk or innovation.  But we are not likely to see Amazon continue to grow and increase its dominance of publishing and bookselling.  Sometimes it’s just time to go.

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.