BIBLIOTHEKE

Over the holidays I finally got my hands on a copy of one of my favorite books for lazy reading, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, which includes a section on the 11 laws of internet branding. Most of what the book discusses seems dead obvious, but the authors stuff it with example after example of major companies making stupid mistakes. Like most of the laws in the book, there’s nothing shocking about their 2nd internet law, the law of interactivity, except how often it’s taken for granted.

The intro to the concept is the standard one, noting that first we had voice and sound with radio, then moving images with television and, finally, interactivity with the web. Perhaps their most important point is that taking a static brand and tossing it on interactive web doesn’t work. It’s like taking a radio show and putting it on the TV without any images. They make the perfect Web 2.0 point that the eBay/Amazon/MapQuest interactive services model takes advantage of this new attribute and, therefore, is inevidably more successful than a web interpretation of another format.

When Google announced that its massive digitization project, many librarians saw it as a direct threat to the library model. Google Print seems so significant because it goes right to the heart of the old library. On the other hand, it poses far more interesting questions about how it affects the role of libraries if we accept that the future of information resources revolves around specialized web services. There seems to be some resistance to the idea of libraries adopting the Google model (a collection of web services), an issue that will be covered in future posts.

This law of interactivity also affects another issue close to librarians, the ebook. For years now, ebooks have been the center of just about every discussion regarding the future of libraries that I have attended or been involved in. Strangely, I never hear folks mentioning interactivity. Most of the time it seems the future of books is just framed as a PDF or DRMed application serving up static pages of text.

I have no idea whether ebooks like this will take off or not. Searching a PDF or HTML copy of a large text is no doubt fantastic for quickly getting specific information, but not many people enjoy reading anything of length online.

Tim O’Reilly recently discussed his view on the future of books during an interview for Read/Write Web.

It’s kind of like going back to this analogy of plays and movies, you have new forms evolve out of old ones. And you also have products that are seen as very different that do the same job, you have products that are seen as the same that do a different job, and you have to kind of parse the whole thing.

So I would say yes there are examples of books that are processes and practices, but we don’t call them books anymore. An online multiplayer game, a classic collaborative book - if you like. But we don’t call it a book anymore. Similarly Wikipedia - classic collaborative reference book, but we don’t call it a book anymore.

Clearly, the web format is a new media form, requiring a totally new approach. Some jobs previously done by books, like quick reference, are now better handled by online tools. And while the added interactivity can sometimes be welcome, there are other times where it’s not wanted. For example, the Max Payne video games take a graphic novel and add interactivity and sound. Does it make the graphic novel obsolete? Of course not.

To O’Reilly, the process of creating books really won’t be fundamentally different, it’ll just be sped up.

For example, think of a book on politics or a book on history. It’s quoting from other books. Also a book on literary criticism. A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books. And I certainly see ways where the Internet can be used to enhance that … it’s just accelerated and enables people to reach out to people who they might not otherwise have worked with.

There’s a lot of experimentation starting up in this area. Just before Christmas, Lessig announced that he is making Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace into a wiki and publishing the resulting work as Code, v2. It will be interesting to see how this develops. Part of the problem with turning a wiki into a book is that it removes the fundamental attributes of interactivity and evolution. It’s like trying air a movie on a radio station.

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