The Book Business

Here’s a “trailer” for the video version of a talk I did for MediaBistro about the future of book publishing in an electronic era. I will try to find the whole thing, or some way for rushkoff.com people to see the entirety, as it was a free talk and free might as well be free.

PBS Roundtable in Full Swing

I’m leading a series of monthly roundtables at http://pbsdigitalnation.org . They will be in the style of Steven Johnson’s original Feed magazine – or as close to that as we can get for the time being – where visitors can develop threaded conversations around the original posts.

The first topic is the PBS Frontline’s Digital Nation documentary, and – perhaps predictably – not everyone in the show likes the way it came out. This is how one from Henry Jenkins begins:

I frankly found the documentary itself mind-numbing and relentless. It rarely trusts the viewer to draw their own conclusions about what they are seeing and it deploys much of the material in ways which point towards a much less nuanced conclusion than any of the participants in the conversation might have advocated. The website allows us to ask our own questions, while the documentary tells us what to think.

And here’s a snip from Second Life founder Philip Rosedale’s thoughts on the end of text:

Hi! Although sequentially reading the individual words comprising an entire novel is a wonderful and complete experience (I’m 41 and spent a big part of my childhood reading everything I could well before computers were available), the most recent research in how the brain is probably organized suggests a better fit between the way we ‘read’ in the digital world of today and the way we actually store and manipulate information internally. The magnificent sense of ‘getting’ Great Expectations has to do with fractal/hierarchical memories that are simultaneously evoked and span different levels of abstraction/cognition. So each of us a has a different (but fairly similar) high level ‘memory’ of what Victorian women were life, for example. That feeling can be instantly evoked by a small trigger – like reading any part of that book. The act of coming to deeply understand the text is the act of connecting and storing a bunch of associations that become your memory of the book. This actually fits pretty well with the cliffnotes + chat + a couple of pictures + a couple of blogs model that compresses a long text into a few minutes of what are effectively short evocative hyperlinks.

Please come visit, participate, share ideas for future roundtables! Next month, a debate about “The Crowd” with Jimmy Wales, Kevin Kelly, Sherry Turkle, Nick Carr, Mark Pesce, RU Sirius, Clay Shirky, Danah Boyd, and Amy Bruckman.

Crowd-jamming a New Book Title for Life Inc.

So RandomHouse has agreed to do a paperback version of Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back.

I’m going to add an extensive “resources” section to the end, with contributions from people and organizations who are succeeding at that challenge.

But they also want to retitle the book. Maybe to something more specific, or at least more evocative. Most people think the book was called “Life” as it is.

So, I am opening this quest up for collaborative frenzy. Help?

The book is about the way value creation and exchange has been legally monopolized by corporations and central banks – as well as how this dehumanizes us. It concludes with ways to take back peer to peer value exchange, and collapse this corporotacracy in the process. Click on the movie above for the 9-minute gist.

But I need a new title – ideally a better one, that will interest more people. Capitalism: A Love Story was a much more accessible title than Life Inc, for example.

If you come up with a title that works, I’ll give you something – like a bunch of books and credit – as well as my thanks.

Digital Nation Roundtable now LIVE

I’m hosting a new place for discussions about our digital future, the Digital Nation Roundtable, on the PBS Frontline site.

I don’t have the direct link yet, so scroll down that page a screen until you see it. And the join in!