(2011-10-24) Public Parts Viral Book

Megan Garben considers the barriers a Book (not just a Printed Book) faces in achieving the Viral spread of its ideas. Books are great, definitely, at capturing ideas. Books are great at claiming cultural ownership of ideas. Books are great at generating speaking gigs based on ideas. Books are great at getting authors paid for ideas. But books are much, much less great at actually propagating ideas — particularly ideas of the relative nuance that EvgenyMorozov’s “Internet intellectuals” (Public Intellectual) tend to favor... The thing that makes books lucrative to authors and publishers — their ability to restrain ideas, to wall them off from the non-book-buying world — is antithetical to virality. How can books be expected to share ideas when the very point of their existence is containment? She notes how Jeff Jarvis' PublicParts is succeeding. The events’ net effect speaks to a new kind of object: the public book, defined as much by its publicness as by its bookishness. At the end of PublicParts, Jarvis mentions that his next project may not be a book at all, but rather a book-without-a-book: a Seth Godin-esque series of public events held both in person and online. “The book,” Jarvis writes, “if there is one, would be a by-product and perhaps a marketing tool for more events.” (Business Models For Information) Could a Book Server help?

Jeff Jarvis likes her thinking, and goes into more detail on plans for a future process (around the idea that technology now leads to efficiency over growth - see his post for multiple links - argh actually it's 4 identical copies of the same post on the Jobless Future (Jobless Recovery), spawning 5 separate discussion threads!). (There's also a Google Plus thread of discussion.)