PUBLISH AND BE DROWNED

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 213: 12/04/2012

A couple of years ago I became quite keen on the idea of publishing my own book on the Web. I got as far as opening PayPal and Google Checkout accounts and setting up a dummy download page on my website to see whether their payment widgets worked. In the end I didn't proceed because I came to realise that though publishing myself minimised costs (no trees need die, no publisher's share taken), the chance of my rather arcane volume becoming visible amid the Babel of the internet also hovered around zero, even if I devoted much of my time to tweaking and twiddling and AdSensing. What's more the internet is so price-resistant that charging even something reasonable like £2 was likely to deter all-comers. But perhaps the real cause of my retreat was that not having a tangible book just felt plain wrong. It's possible I'll try again via the Kindle Store, but I feel no great urgency.

I'm not alone in this lack of enthusiasm: the fact that mainstream book publishers still vastly overcharge for their e-books suggests their commitment is equally tepid (I recently bought Pat Churchland's "Braintrust" in print for £1 less than the Kindle edition). I'm well versed in Information Theory and fully understand that virtual and paper editions have identical information content but, as George Soros   reminded us again recently, economics isn't a science and economic actors are not wholly rational. The paper version of a book just is worth more to me than the e-version, both as a reader and as an author. I really don't want to pay more than £1 for an e-book, but I also don't want to write a book that sells for only £1, and that's all there is to it.

As Tom Arah ruefully explains in his Web Applications column this month, the ideal of a Web where everyone becomes their own author is moving further away rather than nearer, as Adobe dumps mobile Flash after Microsoft fails to support it in Windows 8 Metro. It's precisely the sort of contradictory thinking that afflicts me that helped firms like Apple monopolise Web content by corralling everything through its walled-garden gate. The Web certainly does enable people to post their own works, in much the same way as the Sahara Desert enables people to erect their own statues: what's the use dragging them across the dunes if no-one can find them.

There's always a chance your work will go viral of course but only if it's the right sort of work, preferably with a cat in it (in this sense nothing much has changed since Alan Coren's merciless 1976 parody of the paperback market "Golfing for Cats" - with a swastika on the cover). The truth is that the internet turns out to be a phenomenally efficient way to organise meaningless data, but if you're bothered about meaning or critical judgement it's not nearly so hot (whatever happened to the Semantic Web?) This has nothing to do with taste or intelligence but is a purely structural property of the way links work. All the political blogs I follow display long lists of links to other recommended blogs, but the overlap between these is almost zero and the result is total overload. I regularly contribute to the Guardian's "Comment Is Free" forums but hate that they offer no route for horizontal communication between different articles on related topics. Electronic media invariably create trunk/branch/twig hierarchies where everyone ends up stuck on their own twig.

If the Web has a structural tendency to individualise and atomise, this can be counteracted by institutions like forums and groups that pull humans back together again to share critical judgments. Writing a novel or a poem may best be done alone, but publishing a magazine requires the coordinated efforts and opinions of a whole group of people. A musician *can* now create professional results on their own in the back-bedroom, but they might have more fun and play better on a stage, or in a studio, with other people. The success of a site like Stumblr shows that people are desperate for anything that can filter and concentrate the stuff they like out from the great flux of nonsense that the Web is becoming. The great virtue of sites like Flickr and SoundCloud is that they offer a platform on which to display your efforts before a selected audience of people with similar interests, who are willing and able to judge your work. Merely connecting people together is not enough. 

The billion dollars Facebook just paid for Instagram perhaps doesn't look so outrageous once you understand that it wasn't really technology but savvy and enthusiastic users - the sort Facebook wishes it was creating but isn't because it's too big, too baggy and too unorganised - that it was purchasing. It will be interesting to see how their enthusiasm survives the takeover. The Web is a potent force for democratising and levelling, but it's far from clear yet how far that's compatible with discovering and nurturing unevenly-distributed talent. If publishers have a future at all, it lies in learning to apply such skills as they have in that department to the raging torrent of content.