Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules - New York Times

This is the kind of writing that makes me jealous. I have been observing this "divide" between adocates of books as stand alone media in the form of "codex texts" and advocates of information in its most useful form as in electronic, searchable text strings, forming for some time. This is going to be another "disruptive technology" scene that will play out in hearts, minds and business models. But the issues are laid out cleanly and with good examples in this story from the NYTImes (registration req'd.) I have colleagues who actually believe the codex book is some privileged object (read Deschooling Society" by Ivan Illich to understand why the book is not a special object.) But it seems to me that in the 21st Century, authorship is going to more like collage or what the young people refer to as mash-ups. New works will increasing result from combining parts of existing work and in finding links between disparate works and commenting on them. Attribution is going to be VERY important, as authors reputations will be linked to how they make money. The money is not going to be directly related to producing a "codex text" but I haven't worked out my formulation of the economic model enough to go into that. Read the story. Think about how you use words and ideas in print. Will books as discrete objects become "extinct?" Of course not, look to what is going on in photography for example, where digital photos flourish alongside of artistic applications of darkroom and film. What do you think? And if you link to my post or comment, you will be taking a step toward the future of publishing. Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules - New York Times Technorati tags: disruptivetech publishing