Who makes a book?

Late last week Book Business announced that a "Community-Sourced Book Publisher Launched" called WEbook, kind of a fiction-focused Wikipedia for-profit. As I scrolled through the proposals, I was reminded of another article in CTIAdvertising, When Did It Bekome Acxeptable to Spell Incuhrrectly? WEbook admits that they want to do for book publishing what "American Idol did for music." So, the WEbook "active projects"/proposals section is obviously the humiliation part of the program, where people who should be learning how to use their spell check are instead learning how to use WEbook, convinced they can write a book without knowing how to write a sentence.

There is something of an "ivy-league" and cliquish mentality in publishing, whether it is academic publishing or, from what I have read and heard from published fiction authors, literature, or even mass-market. There has also been a process to getting published which isn't completely dependent on breaking in to the clique. It's largely dependent on learning to write so that someone wants to read it.

Which brings me to this NYTimes article, "He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work). Did he "write" the books? I don't think so. He wrote the code that wrote the books. Because Google writes the algorithms that compile the data about websites doesn't mean that they wrote the data. He compiled the books. So, he's an author without being a writer.

Both these publishing models produce commodified books. Books-by-the-pound, at some point probably worth less than the value of the recyclable paper they are printed on. I don't think the models are inherently bad, but there is something shifty about their implementation. I think if P.T. Barnum were alive, he would approve.

More Googlization

I had not been aware that Google has entered the web bookmarks/social sharing arena until I noticed a link from my last post, "Share what you read: You can display your Google Reader shared items on your blog." Well, one can do that with their "Links" feature, too. Oh, this is soo tempting. Similar to the prospect of using the "Shoppers Card" at the grocery store. Google as the Wishmaster--"Just wish for it, and it can be yours." I'm still not certain what the price will be.

Copy Rules

It's Launch Season again, which means that I'm alternately irritated, amused, and enlightened by the wide range of titles that we have to learn and plan for in just over two weeks. We actually have a good copywriter, so these "rules" are not aimed at him, but were a way to blow off steam after reading frequently optimistic descriptions of many of our titles.

Denise (the Cynic)’s Academic Press Marketing Copy Rules (That Everyone Breaks)

1. Be realistic. Every academic title “examines,” “illuminates,” or otherwise “reveals” something, but they are rarely “riveting,” “exciting” or “groundbreaking,” let alone an “instant classic.” Only use the word “stunning” if a stun-gun is involved because chances are, at best, the “revelations” are plodding and coherent.

2. Don’t use words that hurt. “Extensive” and “exhaustive” exhaust extensively. And “painstaking” says the author was in pain as she wrote it, and intends to pass it on.

3. Every frontlist book in the catalog should be “new,” but then so should every piece of copy.

4. Use the news writer’s rule: Don’t “bury the lead.” The main point of the book should appear in the first two sentences of copy. If you’re unsure what the point of the book is--it should be the part of the book that is not already known by everyone in the discipline. If you’re still unsure, ask the author or acquiring editor “What prompted you to write/acquire this title?” (That always goes over better than “Why the hell are we publishing this crap?”)

5. Another gem from news writing: “Who, what, where, when, why and how.” If you can’t identify these, refer to rule #4.

6. Repeat the title, author, and other bibliographic information only if space is unlimited, because chances are the people who came up with the title think that it is.

7. If you have a say, do campaign for a title and/or subtitle that has some relation to the content of the book. Otherwise be prepared for the reader to be completely lost before the first sentence of copy.

8. Don’t use “the human condition,” or any variation thereof. It usually means someone else’s life sucks, but probably not in the same way that yours does, no matter what you think, and that you’re secretly glad that you’re better than they are.

9. Don’t ask the reader to make leaps of logic, even if the book does.

10. If a word that must be in the copy is not in the dictionary, first italicize, then delete.

If brevity is the soul of wit, I’m at wit’s end.

For more pointers, see:

http://alt-usage-english.org/humorousrules.html
http://www.ameinfo.com/34480.html
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/133379/2067029

Others?

Day JaVue

My recent post to "Denise the Idealist" referenced this article that points to the yet another report about the "University as Publisher". I need to read the whole thing, but can't get past the first couple of paragraphs and an overwhelming sense of deja-vu all over again.

Harvard OA Mandate: The Death Knell

Library Journal, and many others, reported last month that Harvard is mandating that any work by their scholars should be available for free (to paraphrase wantonly). I'm not sure whether to place this in "Idealist" or "Cynic." One would expect Harvard to be a leader in the Humanities and Social Science move towards electronic, and open access, publication. Given the power that the big publishers have over scholarship, the necessity of a mandate towards OA is unfortunate, but not unsurprising.

Catch-up

During a month of flu and it's aftermath, I've read, but not blogged. Here's some of what I missed:

--An excellent essay on the future of the scholarly monograph by Colin Steele, Emeritus Fellow (Librarian), Australian National University, forwarded by Sandy Thatcher

--LJ Academic Newswire Newsmaker Interview: Student Open Access Activist Gavin Baker

--The NYTimes article on Twine, the data organizer. We'll see. I've tried CiteULike, and have used it inconsistently for the last 18 months or so. I have Zotero loaded at home and work, but until I'm able to use the two "as one" as promised, I don't see it working for the way I work. I have a third type downloaded at work, but it took so long to be "approved" for the BETA version, I lost enthusiasm and never installed it. I know, the three I've named aren't exactly the same types of programs, but realistically serve much the same function (similar to this blog, as a matter of fact).

--This posting to Academic Commons: A Day of Scholarly Communication: A NERCOMP SIG Event .

--And, yesterday, one of the many reports that Harvard is leading the way on open access.

Now back to learning a little JavaScript for my day job.

RE: "Death of the Corporation"

The Bits blog at the NYT sees the increase of consumer-generated content and the willingness of companies to incorporate "amateur" content into their marketing as the harbinger of the "Death of the individual corporation." I can't agree. Companies might need to be increasingly flexible in their marketing and sales strategies in order to sell their media (content), software, and hardware, but I don't think this empowers the individual. Rather, their conglomerations just continue to feed in to the accumulation of wealth, and of taste, into the hands of a few. In order to get control into citizens hands, people will have to have control of their media without corporations acting as the gatekeepers. I'm not sure that's possible.