DISQUS

caseorganic · 11 months ago

Great post. Excellent round-up!

Chris · 11 months ago

Scott Heim has written three of the most widely-acclamied novels of the last 20 years? No he hasn't, and that's a ridiculous claim to make. Nice try, though.

william · 11 months ago

"Collaboration in creating an actual work of literary fiction is tricker to discuss"... I'm not sure this counts as an example of success in it, and it's stalled right now until I pull my finger out, but here's one attempt by Jeff Noon and others

http://217babel.com

joanne mcneil · 11 months ago

Hi William,
Thank you for commenting! I've enjoyed the RSA Arts & Ecology blog quite a lot. Not to be taken the wrong way, but while collaborating on this project do you feel you are contributing the best writing to your ability? Or is the project taken slightly less seriously than if it were your own personal writing project? I am curious about incentives in collaborative creative work. It isn't really comparable to decentralization Wikipedia-style --and, admittedly, I am a little skeptical. But I'll definitely follow 217babel now. I'm a big fan of Noon's.

Kathleen · 11 months ago

Joanne, I've been reading Tomorrow Museum for a while now and always really enjoy your posts. You talked about collaboration in creation, but I was wondering what you thought about collaboration in reading. I've been working on The Golden Notebook Project (http://thegoldennotebook.org/) over here at the Institute for the Future of the Book, and it's been exciting to see a community form around the project that past few weeks. Reading your post makes me think a lot about the role of the publisher in establishing a community around the book...what do you think?

joanne mcneil · 11 months ago

Hi Kathleen, I am a huge fan of if:book and I'm embarrassed now I forgot to mention The Golden Notebook Project! It's commendable first for picking such a thoughtful book -- the kind most people think about and appreciate in a private way. It absolutely makes the reading experience less lonely. You can ignore the margins if you want, read them only while rereading a passage, or follow along depending on interest. I love that the reading reflects this moment in time -- considering it as a book that Barack Obama names as a favorite. And I wonder what would happen were a second project staged several years in the future -- what kind of things might people take away from the narrative? What The Golden Notebook provides is an incentive to dig deeper in the text and read to the end within a time frame. Thank you for commenting

trav · 11 months ago

It all starts to make sense and usable once you begin looking at a book and its surrounding online collateral as a "loop". That's great! As is this whole post. Thank you for the recap of the panel discussions. Though you do end on the great note of "The first step is a great book." there are a few thought provoking examples of some real innovation and new products that could be worked into the publishing industry as it evolves.

And I cannot wait for the day that "mainstream readers thinking about publishing houses as they do record labels. That the catalog was curated."

That will be a great day indeed.

doseedoe · 10 months ago

The novel IS dead. Scrappy aphanumerica no match for pure neural shaping. Give it up, the novel is not digestable non linearly. It is the dodo, kill it before you enslave more generations of children to the adult liars: to the prison rule of ruled paper systems. Free your eyes your mind will follow. Understand you were not given a choice, you HAD to use an alphabet and it was beyond your control.