2.0 and all that

As reported on Boing Boing a while back. The following post is a bit philosophical.

Forgive me this brief rant but I’ve just returned from a really exciting 3 days’ ‘digital seminar’, discussing and brainstorming about the future of digital publishing with some of my colleagues.

It’s hard to summarise the shift in thinking that has to occur, from ‘format and content are inseperable’ to the more collaborative, organically evolving, format-sharing horizon we face. (This difficulty is a shame, seeing as I’ve been asked to put together a 10 minute presentation on just this).

But all the speakers at the seminar keep coming back to the same idea, which is that anyone urging a meaningful 21st century approach just has to get their hands dirty, and participate in and understand the creative, shape-shifting value of some of the more prominent online (and offline) communities.

Now the reason I love the YouTube clip attached here is it touches on all the starry-eyed optimism I’m filled with concerning the digital age. Collaboration is as old as the hills, sure, but technology available to us today makes collaboration, and new levels of creativity and communication, possible and scalable. And that’s a good thing. The bread and butter of publishing, ‘ideas’, can reach and grow with people in ways previously unimaginable. In 2.0 land, if the content isn’t how you want it, you’re getting more and more tools to be able to rearrange it yourself into a way that makes it more palatable. Which is fun. And makes the initial core ‘idea’ more, not less, valuable to you and everyone else. So let’s not worry too much about the format just now (although yes, it is interesting)… content/ideas are just as desired as they always were.

There’s a lot of issues to iron out along the way (a copyright law is my personal favourite), but the good news is that at the bottom of this, the real asset of writers and editors, is the almost infinite amount of rich content, ideas, and inspiration that time and time again forms the seeds of community. The challenge now is to set it free in a way that still benefits the original creators. It really should be possible.

So does this mean, total radical change for publishing? yes and no.

A (wise) friend blogged recently:

Publishers should be spending their energies, and money, (1) trying to publish books that readers want to read, and (2) making sure readers know about the books that may interest them. Publishers need to focus equally urgently on making it easy for readers to buy such books when they want, at a price they are happy to pay for it, with all the service that book shoppers have come to expect.

Yep. Business as usual, then? Well oddly enough for someone that’s just come away from 3 days thinking about this stuff, ultimately yes. Once I seperate form(at) and content in my head, decide in which part the ‘book’ lies, yes, the rest makes perfect sense.