What do we have the right not to call a 'book'?

Having said that Media Gifts is a book ‘gathered through dispersion’, I should stress we don’t necessarily need to go quite this far in dispersing our books if we just want to establish a publishing strategy that others can follow. Prior to the publication of The Hacker Manifesto Wark had already disseminated versions of his text on the internet as work-in-progress, by means of the nettime mailing list especially. It is a practice that is of course increasingly common today, down to the level of blog posts, emails and tweets, with most presses being willing to republish material that has previously been published in these forms. Still, what if authors provide interested readers with something as simple as a set of guidelines and links showing how such distributed constellations of texts can be bound together in a coherent, sequential form (perhaps using a collection and organisation tool such as Anthologise which uses WordPress to turn distributed online content into an electronic book)? Just how dispersed, loosely gathered and structured does a free, open, online version of a book have to be for ‘brand name’ presses to be prepared to publish a bound version?

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In an essay in Paper Machine called ‘The Book to Come’, Jacques Derrida asks: ‘What then do we have the right to call a “book” and in what way is the question of right, far from being preliminary or accessory, here lodged at the very heart of the question of the book? This question is governed by the question of right, not only in its particular juridical form, but also in its semantic, political, social, and economic form – in short, in its total form’.

My question is: What do we have the right not to call a ‘book’?

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Dispersing our current work-in-progress will not only provide us with a way of loosening some of the legal ties that bind books, however; it may also help us to think differently about the idea of the book itself.

As Graham Harman writes on his Object-Orientated Philosophy blog:

In not too many years we will have reached the point where literally anyone can publish a philosophy book in electronic form in a matter of minutes, even without the least trace of official academic credentials. I don’t bemoan this at all – the great era of 17th century philosophy was dominated by non-professors, and the same thing could easily happen again. As far as publishing is concerned, what it means is that all publishing is destined to become vanity publishing. (Alberto Toscano recently pointed this out to me.) You’ll just post a homemade book on line, and maybe people will download it and read it, and maybe you’ll pick up some influence.

Yet what is so interesting about recent developments in electronic publishing is not that, what with open access, WordPress, Scribd, Smashwords, Booki and Aaaaarg.org, producing and distributing (and even selling in the case of Smashwords and Kindle) a book is something nearly everyone can do today in a matter of minutes. It is not even that book publishing may, as a result, be steadily becoming more like blogging or vanity publication, with authority and certification provided as much by an author’s reputation or readership, or the number of times a text is visited, downloaded, cited, referenced, linked to, blogged about, tagged, bookmarked, ranked, rated or ‘liked’, as it is by conventional peer-review or the prestige of the press. All of those criteria still rest upon and retain fairly conventional notions of the book, the author, publication and so on. What seems much more interesting is the way certain developments in electronic publishing contain at least the potential for us to perceive the book as something that is not completely fixed, stable and unified, with definite limits and clear material edges, but as liquid and living, open to being continually and collaboratively written, edited, annotated, critiqued, updated, shared, supplemented, revised, re-ordered, reiterated and reimagined.  Here, what we think of as ‘publication’ -- whether it occurs in ‘real time’ or after a long period of reflection and editorial review, ‘all’ at once or in fits and starts, in print-on-paper or electronic form -- is no longer an end point. Publication is rather just a stage in an ongoing process of unfolding.

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)

'Gathered through dispersion': the book to come

At what point does the material that goes to make up a book become bound tightly enough for it to be understood as actually making up a book? Where in practice is the line going to be drawn?

And what if some of this material is disseminated out of sequence, under different titles, in other versions, forms and places where it is not quite so easy to bind, legally, economically or conceptually, as a book? Let us take as an example the version of the chapter in Media Gifts that explores the idea of liquid books. This appears as part of an actual liquid book that is published using a wiki, and is free for users to read, comment upon, rewrite, remix and reinvent. Similarly, the chapter on pirate philosophy is currently only available on a ‘pirate’ peer-to-peer network. There is no ‘original’ or ‘master’ copy of this text in the conventional sense: this text exists only to the extent it is part of a ‘pirate network’ and is stolen or ‘pirated’ (and translated, in the case of the version that recently appeared in the Japanese magazine Gendai-Shiso).

Indeed, while each of the media projects the book is concerned with – at the moment there are ten in all - constitutes a distinct project in its own right, they can also be seen as forming a dynamic network of texts, websites, archives, wikis, IPTV programmes and other internet traces. Consequently, if it is to be thought of as a book at all, it should be understood as an open, distributed and multi-location book: parts of it are to be found on a blog, others on wikis, others again on p2p networks. To adapt a phrase of Maurice Blanchot’s from The Book to Come (for whom Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup de dés orients the future of the book both in the direction of the greatest dispersion and in the direction of a tension capable of gathering infinite diversity, by the discovery of more complex structures’), Media Gifts is a book ‘gathered through dispersion’. 

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)

Open notebook humanities

So what options are available to book authors if (like Wark) they wish to have their work read beyond a certain ‘underground’ level (in Wark’s case that associated with net art and net theory), while at the same time being part of the academic gift economy? 

1.    Authors can publish with an open access press such as Australian National University’s ANU E Press, Athabasca University's AU Press, or Open Book Publishers. Graham Harman brought out Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics with re.press, for instance, with John Carlos Rowe’s The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies shortly due to appear from Open Humanities Press, while Lev Manovich is publishing his new book Info-Aesthetics with Bloomsbury Academic, all of which are open access presses. Still, with the best will in the world, few open access book publishers are already established and prestigious enough as yet to have the kind of ‘brand name’ equivalence to Harvard that Wark desires.

2.    Authors can insist on signing only a non-exclusive contract with a press, one that would allow them to self-archive a peer-reviewed and perhaps even copy-edited version of their book. The difficulty, of course, is in finding a ‘brand name’ publisher willing to agree to this.

3.    Authors can endeavour to negotiate with such a press -- as Wark did with Harvard -- to see if they would be willing to make the published version of their book available for free online, with only the printed version available for sale. Ted Striphas is an author who, with The Late Age of Print, has published a book with Columbia University Press in this fashion. However, such instances often seem to be regarded by publishers as little more than one-off experiments.

4.    Authors can adopt a variation of the strategy advocated on the Self-Archiving FAQ written for the Budapest Open Access Initiative with regard to scholarly journal articles. This is simply ‘“don't-ask/don't-tell”’. Instead, publish with whichever publisher you like, self-archive the full text ‘and wait to see whether the publisher ever requests removal’.

5.    Either that or, if all else fails, author’s can wait for someone to publish a ‘pirate’ copy of this their book on Aaaaarg.org.

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Noticeably, however, all these strategies in effect fasten what are identified -- conceptually, materially and economically -- as finished, complete, unified and bound books in legal binds; they are just different ways of negotiating such binds.

What though if book authors were to pursue ways of openly publishing their research before it is tied up quite so tightly?

To test this, last year I began experimenting with what I am calling an Open Humanities Notebook, taking as one model for doing so the Open Notebook Science of the organic chemist Jean-Claude Bradley. As was emphasized in an interesting 2010 interview with Richard Poynder on the impact of open notebook science, Bradley is making the ‘details of every experiment done in his lab’ - i.e. the whole research process, not just the findings – freely available to the public on the web. This ‘includes all the data generated from these experiments too, even the failed experiments’. What is more, he is doing so in ‘real time’, ‘within hours of production, not after the months or years involved in peer review’.

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Given that one of my books-in-progress deals with a series of projects which use digital media to actualise, or creatively perform, critical and cultural theory, I decided to make the research for this volume freely available online in such an Open Notebook. I am doing so more or less as this research emerges, not just in draft and pre-print form as journal articles, book chapters, catalogue essays and so on, but also as contributions to email discussions, conference papers, lectures. Long before any of these texts are collected together and given to a publisher to be bound as a book, economically, materially and conceptually, then. 

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As is the case with Bradley’s Notebook, this Open Humanities Notebook offers a space where the research for this volume, provisionally titled Media Gifts, can be disseminated quickly and easily in a manner that enables it to be openly shared and discussed.  More than that, though, it provides an opportunity to experiment critically with loosening at least some of the ties used to bind books once a text has been contracted by a professional press.

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For instance, it is common for most book contracts to allow authors to retain the right to republish in their own works material that has previously appeared elsewhere (as scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals, say), provided the necessary permissions have been granted. But what if draft or pre-print versions of the chapters that make up my book are gathered together in this Open Notebook? When it comes to publishing this research as a bound book, are ‘brand name’ presses likely to reject it on the grounds of reduced potential sales since a version of the material will already be available online? Will I be required to remove this material to ensure they have the exclusive right to sell or give away copies?

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)

McKenzie Wark, ‘copyright, copyleft, copygift’

Carrion’s primary concern of course was with the conception of the book as an object (a series of pages both divided and gathered together in a coherent, and usually numbered, sequence), and with its material forms of support and fabrication (paper, binding, printing, ink, typography, layout and so forth). Is it possible therefore that, rather than in ontological terms, the idea of the unbound book can be addressed more productively via one of the other senses in which books can be said to be tied? I am thinking specifically in terms of legal contracts. These function to establish territorial boundaries marking when certain ideas and actions relating to the book are ‘out of bounds’, forbidden, limited by restrictions and regulations (concerning copyright, Intellectual Property, notions of authorship, attribution and so on).

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A 2007 article by McKenzie Wark, ‘Copyright, Copyleft, Copygift’, offers an interesting starting point for thinking about this aspect of the book. In it Wark addresses the contradiction involved in his having on the one hand written a book against the idea of intellectual property, A Hacker Manifesto, and on the other published it with an established academic press, Harvard, which refused to allow him to release it under a Creative Commons license as part of the new, emergent, digital gift economy.

 

Wark’s solution was to ‘Live the contradictions!’ between commodity and gift culture, and also to carry a memory stick to speaking events so anyone who wanted a post-print copy of A Hacker Manifesto could get one for free from him personally, in the form of a text file they could even alter if they so wished. Nevertheless, disseminating A Hacker Manifesto by sneakernet - or pink Roos, in Wark’s case - does little to resolve the problem he identifies: namely, how to meet an author’s desire to have their work distributed to, respected and read by as many people as possible -- something a ‘brand name’ print press like Harvard can deliver -- while also being part of the academic gift economy.

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Surprisingly, Wark doesn’t appear to have been aware of the possibility of publishing his research open access, thus making it available online for free, to anyone with access to the internet, without the need on the part of readers to pay a cover price, library subscription charge or publisher’s fee. Yet even if he had been, open access would not have provided a straightforward solution to Wark’s dilemma, since there is an important difference between publishing scholarly journal articles open access and publishing books open access. As is made clear in the Self-Archiving FAQ written for the Budapest Open Access Initiative:

Where exclusive copyright has been assigned by the author to a journal publisher for a peer reviewed draft, copy-edited and accepted for publication by that journal, then that draft may not be self-archived [on the author’s own website, or in a central, subject or institutional repository] by the author (without the publisher's permission).

The pre-refereeing preprint, however, [may have] already been (legally) self-archived. (No copyright transfer agreement existed at that time, for that draft.)

This is how open access is able to elude many of the problems associated with copyright or licensing restrictions with regard to articles in peer reviewed journals (assuming the journals in question are not themselves already online and open access). But ‘where exclusive copyright… has been transferred... to a publisher’ -- for example, ‘where the author has been paid... in exchange for the text’, as is generally the case in book publishing, but not with journal articles -- it may be that the author is not legally allowed to self-archive a copy of their book or any future editions derived from it open access at all. This is because, although the ‘text is still the author's "intellectual property"… the exclusive right to sell or give away copies of it has been transferred to the publisher’.


(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)

Ulises Carrión: a text is only a book when it is bound

As we know from Ulises Carrión, there is no such thing as an unbound book.  ‘A writer… does not write books’, he declares in ‘The New Art of Making Books’:

A writer writes texts.

The fact, that a text is contained in a book, comes only from the dimensions of such a text; or, in the case of a series of short texts (poems, for instance), from their number.

The book is just a container for text.  The idea of binding is thus essential to the book.

Tempting though it may be, then, we can’t say that whereas in the past the book had been bound it isn’t anymore and that, after centuries of print, such conventional notions of the book have become outdated. We can’t say this, not just because e-books and iPad apps -- while offering different types of binding to printed books, different ways of securing pages together -- nevertheless reinforce rather conservative, papercentric notions of bookishness that make their identities just as closed, fixed, stable, locked-down and certain in their own ways as those of the scroll and codex book (for authors and publishers, but also for readers). That’s one reason, to be sure. But the main reason we can’t say this is because an unbound book is quite simply no longer a book. Without a binding, without being tied or fastened tightly together, a writer’s text is not a book at all: it is just a text or collection of texts. A text is only a book when it is bound.

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)