BEN VERSHBOW: The Book as Social Node

Ben Vershbow spoke to Phil Pochoda’s Book Publishing class this Thursday. He is Editor in Chief of the Institute for the Future of the Book, which has been around for three and a half years and was started by the legendary Bob Stein, one of the founders of The Voyager Company and the Criterion Collection. Ben is 28 years old, talks fast, and is an excellent advocate for the Institute’s projects. He had a difficult time getting his laptop to interface with the LCD projector, which immediately endeared me to him.

Ben introduces himself as “a new kind of editor, something more like a project manager,” and he begins by asking us what we would do if we were to found a publishing company today (today being another way of saying in the digital age).

He defines books as stable, frozen entities, definitive versions, objects and products that are different from internet sites, which are social spaces, are a process that flows. Texts on the internet are places.

Despite his use of descriptive language that edges toward dissing books (or am I being too sensitive?), this is an accurate distinction. The act of reading hasn’t been a social experience since the late Roman Empire, when people shifted from reading out loud to reading silently. The rise of the internet perhaps signals a return to an oral culture.

“The blogosphere is a social network in which people talk to each other in a largely textual way,” Ben says. “This is closer to the way we speak. The new forms are much closer to conversational forms.”

Blogs are dialogic, collaborative and participatory, according to Ben. The benefits of blogs are that they can incorporate the wisdom of the crowd (Wikipedia), function as a marketing network and make texts stickier by making them interactive. All this might actually increase print sales, he says.

Also, blogs are often records of reading, which is not new to the internet. He mentions the 19th century practice of people exchanging reader’s diaries.

As an example of books as nodes in a network of conversations, he shows us a slide of the first page of the Vilna edition of the Babylonian Talmud, with its multiple layers of commentaries representing 15 centuries of discussion (see http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rs/2/Judaism/talmud.html ). This, he tells us, is the image of a networked book.

Design has a profound impact on how a book works, and the Talmud slide is an excellent example of the creative use of margins in a book. We think of margins as private, but here they have become a public space for comments from readers.

The printer in this instance has built an ingenious infrastructure for rabbinical scholars to discuss the text. Today, authors and publishers can design a stable template in which readers can post comments. Then they will become community managers or moderators who chair the discussions that follow.

He is dismissive of ebook reading devices. “If ebooks are just digital versions of a text, they are a failed digital iteration,” he says.

Let’s all make something together is an immensely attractive declaration, but what precedes this is the act of writing, which is a solitary process (all the hypertext fiction I’ve seen is bad). However, it is certainly true that books and the web can be complementary processes. The internet can provide an author with the opportunity for immediate peer review at the developmental stage of editing. A website can become a workshop. Traditional publishing involves choosing, developing and packaging—all of which can be done with great efficiency on the web.

In addition, the web offers authors and publishers new opportunities. Vershbow acknowledges the dearth of quality information on the web. The signal to noise ratio is bad. Authors and publishers (and booksellers) can create infrastructure that filters out the junk. And they can also create content that is worth our time and attention.

Ben’s talk is a tour through the Institute for the Future of the Book. I won’t attempt to describe the projects he’s involved in, but you can access them yourself at http://www.futureofthebook.com .

At the end of the session Phil brings up the question of a business model, an issue that’s always at the back of my mind during talks like this. The marketplace is most certainly an imperfect feedback loop, but without it this discussion feels kind of trippy to me.

Ben readily admits the Institute is supported by foundation grants and that he is working with scholarly books, an area of publishing that traditionally hasn’t worried much about business models.

“Instead of new business models, we’re thinking about creating new experiences for readers,” he says. It’s a good answer.

The rarified arena in which these projects are developed is distant from the world of retail, which is where I live, but I am glad Mr. Vershbow and his comrades are out there doing this interesting work. Despite the Institute’s disconnect from the marketplace, I believe that what he says is directly applicable to what I do. His description of the new roles of publishers in the digital world sounded precisely like what I think booksellers have always done. We build and host communities of readers and writers. Books are the central nodes of our social networks.

What’s different now is that the internet provides us with a set of fine tools that we can use to reach new audiences.