About
The unbook is a concept originally developed by Jay Cross. The concept evolved based on discussions between Jay and Dave Gray in the summer of 2008. Jay published the first unbook, Learnscape Architecture, on August 12, 2008. The book is now titled Learnscaping and at the time of this writing (February 2009) was in version 1.32. The second unbook, Marks and Meaning, was published by Dave the following day.
This site intends to chronicle the development of the unbook movement, and provide a comprehensive catalogue of all unbook titles, the uncatalogue. To get an unbook listed in the catalogue, please use our contact form and tell us the title of the book (with link to the “buy” page), its author (with link if possible) and a short description of the book. Lengthy descriptions will be edited. Unbooks will be listed alphabetically by title.
More about the unbook:
Dawn of the unbook
Meet the new schtick
For more information about unbooks, see The unbook presentation and What is an unbook?
Do you have questions about the unbook, or comments, or suggestions? Leave a comment here and we’ll do our best to respond.
Is a wiki an unbook?
Hi Harry, great question!
Certainly the wiki and the unbook have a great deal in common: Information managed and informed by a community, focused content area, ongoing continuous updates, etc.
At the same time I think that some kind of hard copy is an important element of an unbook. A wiki is optimized for search — there’s no way to know how to order the pages. One advantage of an unbook is that it can have a digital as well as a printed form. Because of the constraint that it must be printable, an unbook will tend to have a natural order and narrative flow that a wiki does not have.
But this is just my opinion. The unbook is a movement, and as such it really needs to be defined by a community. What do you think?
The idea of maintaining a sequence appropriate to print – usually a sequence of topics or events – does present some constraints. A wiki’s articles are related to other articles mainly by some concept of “related” topics/events. Those relationships could be harnessed and used to create print works. Though an alphabetical print encyclopedia could (and has been) printed from Wikipedia material.
On the other hand, writing contextual material is required to enrich the passage from one topic/event to another. The strictest requirements arise from linear texts. The loosest requirements may come from alphabetically arranged material. And a “choose your own adventure” story would be a middle ground between a linear sequence and an alphabetical sequence.
Robert Horn has developed a model of decontextualized hyperlinkable “information”. Perhaps it would be worth while providing some guidelines for how to construct texts that minimize contextual requirements in order to survive and grow in a variety of alternative forms/editions/versions.
Great points Bob. This form is evolving and I think there will be many explorations that involve re-mixing and contextual “link-bridges: such as you describe.
Just came across this related observation from edwardconfessor: “Catalogues are never finished, just different distances from the point of origin.”
The standard product or parts catalogue, re-issued regularly, seems to be a good example of a continuously evolving print-oriented product.
I’m sure it has something to do with the late afternoon sleepies, but the very word “unbook” seems un-natural and un-clear.
There are “traditional” books, which I understand from my years in the publishing biz.
There are audio books…traditional books on tape, CD, or MP3.
There are e-books, traditional books in digital form (pdf, etc).
If an “unbook” shares many of the characteristics of both a traditional book and an e-book, how is that it can be called an “un-book”? It’s like calling an electric car an un-car. It just doesn’t work.
I’m with Harry…this just sounds like a wiki to me. The only difference is that you make a print version available…at which point it becomes a regular old book, regardless of how many times you update it.
I suggest you consider a different name if you really want the idea to catch on as something new and improved. But that’s just my opinion and it may not be worth much more than the digital space it occupies.
Hi Eric,
I do think the unbook is different in many ways than a wiki and have put some thoughts here.
You make some good points about the name “unbook” which probably deserve some thought. At the same time I kind of like the “un-clarity” of the term “unbook.” It offers people a range of ways to explore the concept.
By the way, the “un” in unbook is not intended to refer to negation but a state of “unfinishedness.” Unbook is short for “unfinished book” in the same way that the “e” in email is short for “electronic mail.” So an “un-car” in this context would not necessarily mean “not a car” so much as a car in a state of evolution (un-fortunately, “e” was already taken). At the same time I like that “un” can be read as a negation, because it allows people to start thinking about what a traditional book is, and is not, in a way that focuses on differences rather than similarities, i.e., “how is it unlike a traditional book?” as opposed to “it’s like a book but it’s audio.”
It seems that the trend to name digital forms after the physical forms they emulate is a clear and emerging one. People name the new stuff after similarities to the old stuff sometimes without even adding a prefix: email, ebooks, instant messaging, chat, pages, files, folders, windows, etc., just to name a few.
To riff a bit more on your thoughts, it’s possible to explore almost any newly coined term in this way.
How is an audio-book like a book? It has nothing in common with the book as an object. Why not simply call it a “reading?”
How is an e-book in pdf format different from any other pdf file, with the possible exception that it also comes in bound, printed form and includes things like a table of contents, chapters and indices? Why not simply call it a “file?”
It’s not hard to find reasons to discount a new term and it’s also not always easy to name a new and emerging trend, because such things are by nature ambiguous and un-formed. But for better or worse, it seems that if we want to talk about a new form we often need a new word that’s easy to remember.
Thanks for the reply, Dave. I probably just missed the original, but this is the first time I have heard the “unbook” as short for “unfinished book.” That makes perfect sense and is easy to immediately build a mental model without the pre-existing paradigms getting in the way.
Since I know that you have somewhat of a bg in marketing, think of it this way. “Un” as a prefix carries it’s weight of authority as “negation.” It is un-likely that you or I could change that. I think that’s where the problem comes in. It doesn’t seem that you are trying to communicate, per se, that this is “not a book,” because it is clearly a book…just a new way of doing books. Saying it is an unbook (negation) certainly makes for interesting conversation, but it violates many of the laws of communication that are necessary for an idea to propogate, simplicity being the prime directive. That is precisely why “e-book” and “audio book” worked so well and caught on so quickly: They are simple enough for the average Joe to grasp with little thought and do not attempt to violate or redefine existing paradigms that are practically hard-wired into the brain.
I certainly agree that the “new word” must be easy to remember and have no brilliant or creative suggestions. However, it seems to me that if I had to work this hard to explain my concept to others, that would tell me that the word I’ve chosen is not right for the context and will likely struggle to ever stand on it’s own (i.e., without thorough explanation). But I may just be oversimplifying. I tend to do that.
Seems there should be an easy, clear, and clever way of saying that this is a perpetual book; an unending book; infinte book.
How about “Never-Ending Story” …kidding
Or FluxBook (state of constant change)?
Or ModBook (modification)?
Or MetaBook (as a prefix denoting “after”, “beyond”, “with”, “adjacent”)?
I am very excited to find your thoughts about these ideas and the comments made by others to further this topic. For the last few months, I have been working on a book project that I’ve been wanting to organize through the use of a wiki, both because there are many contributing authors and because i would eventually like to make it available in that format for the public. I am finding resistance from my main collaborators because they fear that the online format will undermine the sales of the actual books. I would like to know your opinion and experience with that.
I like the name unbook, even before I knew it signified unfinished book. It has just the right twist that inspires me to imagine what it could be. My wish of working like this is to underscore the living nature of a body of knowledge. It isn’t often static or finished and I think the more we have structures and containers (such as the concept of unbook) which refer to that dynamic state of knowledge, the more fluid we become in our comprehension, and no doubt, our imaginations.
I won’t be the first to suggest that information sharing structures roughly follow the same pattern as Freudian conscious/unconscious mind structures.
On one hand, I get the impression that our written and visual record is a way to externalize what is or what has been conscious thought at one point, something we attributed importance to for whatever reason. This is a very passive point of view, in the sense that the act of creation is not a very conscious choice: we just like something for some reason and start researching, building, associating, and writing.
What attracts me in open books, collaborative works, unbooks, and the like is the deconstructionists notions in there. Death of the author(ity), the realization that the idea of the Self-made man is a mythology, etc.
What interests me too is that the dynamic seems to revolve around these discussions about control and ownership. Am author has a unique vision, and collaborative work will yield a radical type of mediocrity.
In my above writing, I paraphrased several philosophers and authors without attribution. In the ‘old’ paradigm, that’s nearly plagiarism, unless the ideas float around so ubiquitously that we reassign them to the realm of common sense. Is this what we are doing? Continuously defining a new ‘common sense’ of how things are?
I would like to think that the potential of something called an un[fillinthegap] is not necessarily negation of what came before, since it would then take an antagonistic shape yet describe exactly the same as the previous approach from an oppositional perspective. In other words “old win in new bags”, “this is nothing new”. I would like to think that an (un)book would mean a continuous (yes, fluid) redefinition of story.
Yet, the tension, the paradox remains. Unless everybody reads and edits it, it will have to be oppositional to something, because it is an iterative representation of how a group commonly views a certain subject.
Can we step out of that Cartesian – dualistic – frame of mind, and create? Not create something, but just create, and not define our creations in a categorized way that suggests certain structure or narrative, yet is merely a ‘dump’ of our consciousness stream that has enough coherence to be recognized?
A complete random creation is not valued. Is this because it is not valuable, or is it because we are not capable of recognizing its value?
Ah I’m rambling. These things are a struggle of sorts for me. I like the concept of an unbook, but I never stop questioning what I like. I’d like to think the concept of the unbook itself should be as fluid as its contents. In that way, it won’t be a McLuhan like ‘medium is the massage’ phenomenon.