The author’s community, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

There’s been a flurry of conversation around the unbook, ranging everywhere from approbation (I love it!) to apathy (There’s nothing new here!) to despair (It’s the end of the book as we know it!). There’s an interesting discussion thread that covers most of this territory here.

Adam Greenfield calls the unbook “a container for long-form ideas appropriate to an internetworked age… the notion allows such works to usefully harness the dynamic and responsive nature of discourse on the Web, while preserving coherence, authorial voice and intent.”

Several have commented “I don’t see how an unbook is different than a wiki” (I have attempted an answer to that question and look forward to a continued dialogue on that subject).

Henry Quirk predicts that “most of the ‘unbooks’ that pop up will never see a version 2.0. the ‘authors’ of such things — having attention spans less impressive than a mayfly’s life — will move on to the next awkward, flash-in-the-pan, internet/real life hybrid as soon as such a thing rears its ugly head. Unbooks — as a concept — will end up as a cultural cul de sac: a curious artifact of a misguided desire to see ‘the people’ empowered beyond ‘their’ competence.”

I think Mr. Quirk also speaks for a lot of people when he says “committee work tends to lack innovation… there’s a dulling homogenization with multiple hands in the pot. Seems to me: the ‘unbook’ reeks with the b.o. of ‘too many cooks in the kitchen.’”

This comment has been echoed by many others in various ways. People seem to see the unbook as a book created by a committee of multiple authors that can only result in a watered-down, tepid product that attempts to satisfy everyone and in the process satisfies no one. This is an absolute misconception that I need to correct.

I think a lot of it has to do with the idea of sharing control, and some fears that many artists and writers have about opening up their process to public scrutiny. Artists and writers are in many ways like magicians: they create an effect for their audience, and like magicians, many creative people feel that to expose their process would ruin the magic and educate competitors at the same time. This has some truth to it.

Authors have as many ways of working as you could possibly imagine. Some work in solitude and feel the need to protect their work from early criticism, just as a newborn baby must be protected from the elements. Others engage in dialogue with a small circle of friends as a way to work out their ideas. Most writers collaborate with an editor or get opinions on early drafts from colleagues. Writers will sometimes solicit contributions (a section, a chapter, an essay) from people they respect.

Eventually, however, if the book is to be published at all, a wider dialogue emerges, involving critics and a community of readers. After all, what is a book without that community? Authors make book tours, they give readings, they are interviewed in talk shows and on the radio, all in an effort to share their ideas and build that community of readers.

J. K. Rowling is a wonderful writer who has captivated a whole generation with her stories, but does anyone really think that the seven books in the Harry Potter series, written over ten years an amidst a firestorm of public adoration and attention from the press, were not influenced or informed by her ongoing conversations with readers?

The fact is, like many things we like to call “new media,” the unbook is really a recombination of things that already exist. There’s nothing the unbook does, or proposes to do, that doesn’t already happen in some way in the publishing world. The unbook — like a lot of new media concepts — simply changes the dynamics by making manifest and obvious things that already existed, offline.

The roles have been there forever: the author, the editor, the contributor, the critic, and the community of readers. The unbook does not fundamentally change the process but makes it more transparent and adaptive by “webifying” it.

1. The unbook makes the boundaries between a writer’s inner circle and the public more porous. By connecting through social networks and online technologies that enable larger community discussions, the author can, if he or she so chooses, expand the diameter of the inner circle, inviting more people to engage in the early phases of creation.

2. The unbook makes it easier for the author to explore different form factors — sizes and shapes — for the physical book itself, and try out things like full-color, embedded diagrams and other innovations, to see what works best for readers without taking on a major expense.

3. The unbook, because it accelerates the process, makes it far more adaptive to change. More people can participate early in the process, and criticisms or challenges can be addressed immediately within the text.

Thus the unbook is not revolutionary so much as evolutionary.

The traditional book-authoring process contains many risks: The author has to make many guesses about what readers want, what they will say, and anticipate criticism, before the book is published. And because the published book is sacrosact (so much work has gone into it, and it’s typically presented as a finished creation), the author is forced (or feels obligated) to defend concepts from criticism even when they are thoughtful and insightful. The dynamic is adversarial rather than collaborative.

There is also the publisher to consider. The publisher of a traditional book usually has taken on considerable risk in the form of advances against royalties, marketing, printing, warehousing and distribution costs. All these things together can put tremendous pressure on the author to deliver results.

An unbook relieves many of these pressures. The author can engage readers earlier and respond to criticism faster. A publisher becomes an option rather than a necessity.

An unbook can be all these things, and an author does not have to relinquish any control to have them. There is a fundamental difference between an open process and a collaborative process. My unbook, Marks and Meaning, has only one author: Me. And just like many authors before me, I happily retain an iron-clad control over what is in or out of the book. At the same time, much of the process is open because I invite comments, criticism and contributions from readers. Sometimes they change my opinion, sometimes they don’t. But in my case the dialogue is critically important to the development of the ideas, and now that I have tried this approach I can’t imagine doing a book any other way.

At the same time, if an author wishes to open up the process entirely and share control with others, that’s also possible. But it’s not the only way.

Mr. Quirk may be right, that “most of the ‘unbooks’ that pop up will never see a version 2.0,” that “unbooks — as concept — will end up as a cultural cul de sac.” But it’s also possible that some new authors and voices will arise that thrive in this new medium; that — were it not for the unbook — would never have been heard. And it’s also possible that they have something of value to say. I hope so.

Some very interesting experiments by Russell Davies.

The unbook process, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

A couple of people have asked how unbooks differ from wikis. That’s a great question and led to some reflection and a conversation with my friend Alan Smith (Thanks Alan!) which yielded a few insights.

The top line: Unbooks and wikis are similar in some ways but different in others.

Similarities: Both wikis and unbooks:

1) Are subject to constant and continuous change.

2) Involve communities who are interested in developing content or topic areas.

3) Can have multiple authors.

4) Have multiple defined roles within the community, i.e., reader, author, editor, etc.

Differences:

1) A wiki community is centered around online content in the form of hyperlinked web pages, while an unbook community is centered around printed content in the form of a book.

2) The number of pages in a wiki is conceptually unlimited, while the number of pages in an unbook is limited by its presence in the physical world. The limits may vary but my self-imposed limit is around 400 pages. This forces constant winnowing of the content to a finite set.

3) Because of the size limitation, an unbook’s online content has a tendency to greatly exceed the printed content. This forces more rigor into the editorial process for the printed content. The online content supplements and reinforces the ideas in the book, and also forces change in the book over time. The result is that the unbook is a tightly edited, up-to-date summary of what can be found on the web.

4) A wiki does not have a linear narrative while an unbook does: Before a physical book can be printed the order of its pages must be determined.

5) An unbook has natural offshoots (the physical objects) where the content is frozen in time. This allows one to take a historical look at an unbook in a different way than a wiki. In a wiki, you can look at the evolution of individual pages but it’s difficult to have an “entire snapshot” of the wiki at a particular instant in time.

6) A wiki can include motion and video while an unbook can only point to such things — the print media has constraints. These constraints can be valuable and are well-known: The unbook needs no electicity and never goes down. It can be archived for thousands of years. When reading an unbook one is less subject to interruption by IM, email, dings and beeps, etc.

7) I suppose the primary difference is one of intentions and expectations.

An unbook is a narrative object: a developing account that may change significantly over time, like a children’s story that is told and retold with additions and changes by multiple authors. Like a story an unbook has a clear beginning and end, although those things might change over time.

A wiki is a map object: a virtual space that can be searched, explored and navigated in various ways. A wiki, like a physical space, has many starting and ending points. You can enter a wiki many ways and there is no “end” to a wiki.

These are just one person’s thoughts. I hope you will add your thoughts and comments to this interesting thread.

Here’s a bit of the history of an unbook once named Eat the Dog Food which morphed into Learnscape Architecture and then into Learnscaping. In the space of six months, this unbook went through five upgrades, bulking up from 75 pages to 150+, with content improvements all along the way. Since they are published on demand, unbooks can also be considered

Informal Learning Fieldbook 2.0, 8-minute presentation, April 2008

Stream of Consciousness, April 2008

Flipped out, May 2008  (Check the movie part.)

Dawn of the Unbook, June 2008

Dog Food No More, July 2008

Learnscape Architecture un-book morphs, August 2008

Unbook conversation wrap-up, August 2008

The evolution continues. The current version of Learnscaping may be the end of the line. I’m hard at work on a new unbook that will supplant the old.

We use the term unbook because it’s very much a rethinking and perhaps “overturning” of the book authoring and publishing process. The unbook process can be anywhere from “completely open” (multiple authors, shared process) to “partially open” (single author with editorial control, with contributions from a user community). My book, Marks and Meaning, is certainly the latter. I retain editorial control over the product and oversee the community. An open book is a category of unbook that’s “open source” in the sense that the content is accessible to anyone and open to authors who wanted to re-mix the book and add enhancements or additional content. FLOSS Manuals is an example of an open book process.