July-August 2008 Volume 42, No. 4
Stephen Abram is past president of the Canadian Library Association. We asked him about the future of publishing.
FUTURIST: In your talk on the future of publishing, you brought up the notion that there are two roads:, the road of trepidation, decline, extinction or the road of embracing the future. Let's assume everyone wants to go with B. What's the next step, for someone like a traditional book publisher?
Abram: What needs to happen is to stop telling people and to start listening, to start working from the reader's the user’s, the experiencer's contact in. Then they can start creating the products that actually match the behaviors of their user base. In many markets, the traditional publishing formats are misaligned with what needs to happen. So, for instance, if you're a medical publisher, do you want your cardiac surgeon to walk into your room before he does your surgery and say, 'I read the article last night'? No. You want him to have had a thousand experiences putting his hand in someone's chest and knowing what it feels like. It should be just like an experience a car mechanic has where he can put his hand on the hood of your car and say it's the manifold because he's seen it, heard it, smelled it a thousand times. So, how do you create an experience context where you put content that can be read into that space? How can you create content that actually aligns with learning behaviors? So, if you've got a publishing program to support the doctor, and streaming media to show what's going on, this? is infinitely superior when combined with text than just text. It means taking these Web 2.0 environments and incorporating what we today call YouTube, but really the whole streaming media package, the podcasting package, knowing that certain people learn better by hearing it--such as politicians; certain people learn better by seeing it, like surgeons; certain people learn better, like lawyers; and there are three-dimensional learners like engineers who? deal better with a visual interface that assembles the information in front of them. So if you work from your end-user in and you keep your mind open to the way they do things, then it makes a big difference. If you're looking at K-12 learners, where they haven't been funneled into very narrow learning styles or supporting very narrow learning styles, then you see that most of the textbook publishing has moved to Bloom’s taxonomy of learning styles and they're trying to use it all.
FUTURIST: Along those lines, a lot of people--writers--would say, 'I don't know how good I look on camera, don't even know how well I speak.' Nabokov himself once said, 'I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.' A lot of people would say that when you put in too many mediums, it clouds the focus and it gets in the way of people being able to exercise their expertise. This follows Andrew Keen's notion that so much participation, so much inviting the user into the experience creates a cacophony of people without information sharing uninformed opinions. What can be done to ensure this remains a process of authentic information creation, and what can be done to preserve expertise in an environment where everyone can act like an expert?
Abram: There are two questions that I hear: one is the uninformed opinion, which I'll address second. The other is, 'how do we create this kind of stuff? I don't look good enough, I don't sound good enough.’ Well that's why we have other professionals, it's why we have actors. It's why we have good looking people doing the news. There's nothing wrong with that. You need writers to put the words in their mouths. When movies went to talkies, think of all those silent film actors who totally failed because they had squeaky voices.
FUTURIST: A “Singing in the Rain” scenario....
Abram: Now, as for people sharing their uninformed opinions, that's part of the Internet as conversations. It's hard to lie or be incomplete on the Internet--by that I mean, you can put all sorts of stuff into Wikipedia and it gets corrected very rapidly. Remember that wonderful Nature study that showed that Wikipedia had the same error rate as Britannica. Britannica has what, 700,000 articles and Wikipedia has 8 million? I'm not against Britannica. It no doubt has very high-quality content for the narrow, very small part of the world it covers, but let's take an incredibly difficult and broad topic like Islam. Look at the entry in Wikipedia for Islam and you will find nothing but complaints about print sources on that where some editor decided what would be an appropriate way to try to learn something. Whereas the community-developed message on Islam in Muslim in Wikipedia delivers a much better organized understanding--detailing whether you're following Mohamed, Mohamed's brother Kadia, and how the different facets of Islam develop. It doesn't have the warfare that it had in the early days. I do worry about people spreading misinformation. But I also believe that the role of society and peer pressure seems to work to adjust the socially-driven Web. An informed opinion means you're open to all points of view. Some people's evaluation methodology for content is, is it the right point of view? We've set up our education to have kids make their own judgments now, instead of installing Point of View 1.0 into their heads.
FUTURIST: All of these points of view create a broader perspective, but, in touching on something that Douglas Rushkoff said...in many ways, the people doing the authoring in the 21st Century are the programmers. This is to say, that the ability to write Web applications has become more valuable than any particular piece of verbal content carried on an application.
Abram: If you ask somebody like Jimmy Wales, he would make a big distinction between the people who wrote media wiki, like himself, and the people who are providing the content. Which is more powerful? Infinitely more powerful? the people providing the content, not the programmers. Now the programmers are powerful in that they create the medium for content to be linked. But once their work is done, it becomes a matter of incremental improvements. At some point, another discontinuous change.
FUTURIST: Bottom line, you think it will still be possible to make money from words later this century?
Abram: It's like what's happened with music. Originally, you made your money from sheet music, then performances, then you made your money from LPs, and now it's gone back to making money from concert tours. More people in the nonfiction space make their money from consulting, teaching. The books are objects that are part of an ecology that includes performance, whether you're a teacher, a consultant, a marketer. Why do I write a blog? I have something to say, but I also have a context in which I say it, which is my software company. I have an ecology I contribute to which is the institutions I partner with to lead them into this next generation of the way the world is going to work.
FUTURIST: Okay, let's talk about that. It's twenty years in the future. I'm an author. That means I either have someone else read my material or--if I look okay and read okay--I read myself to make multi-media presentations.
Abram: Reading isn't going to go away, but it's only one aspect. Probably, it will be some combination of reading, visual conversations, lessons. Your authoring is contributing to a corpus that is significantly larger than it is now electronically. Most of the important stuff will have been converted twenty years from now. We can convert the entire Library of Congress for $9 billion right now, which, in terms of national priorities, is only 5 weeks of Iraqi conflict. It's doable. It used to be undoable. The corpus, the ability to create cultural context is going to change the nature of how culture is expressed when you look at culture as a cultural activity. So 50% of everything ever written in Chinese has already been converted and put into a central vault. They're 5 years away from almost 100% of all Chinese documentation and books being converted...
FUTURIST: That's a wonderful statistic...
Abram: When you look at what project Alouette in Canada, which is doing all the Canadian stuff, the Open Content alliance, the Google Digital Vault, the private sector vs. public sector vs. charitable initiatives including the Guttenberg project, the question is, is your tree falling in the forest more likely to be heard because it's been digitized, and at what point twenty years from now is it likely to be discovered? If it's digitized in such a way that you can actually find it beyond free text, using taxonomic, ontological search engines that actually find things, or behavioral context, tagging context, or somebody discovered who you trust and you say, okay, this person, who is an amazing person, really understands the nanotechnology of creating artificial eyes, recommends this article from 1962, will we be able to find that sort of stuff? I think publishers in the future are more likely to be guides. New publishing will be discovered not in the published frame work but in things like reprints. The entertainment object, like fiction, video, etc., is very different. When we look at significant portions of the scholarly space they will no longer publish, because they can get all the grant money they want. They have no issues with tenor. If you're in the genome, nanotech, or any of these bleeding edge disciplines, the twenty people who know what you know are so far out there that looking in the published literature is 10 years out of date. If it's juried, it's so far back that no one really cares. They're out reading blogs and sending out articles within their own social space and community of practice that are electronic and global. 20 years from now, that will be significantly more traceable in a social context. We're seeing the beginning of it in these white-label social networks, more developed in Facebook and Myspace and mixing in Bebo because they're public social spaces, but when we look at Ning and the private social spaces, the ability to put private conversation and bring in public conversation and public content into that space, it's fascinating......People are trying to deal with the moment right now.
This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker