The wages of precarity, the costs of globalization

Last October, on the Wall Street Journal’s “Real Time Economics” blog, there was a discussion of a new work of economic analysis which purports to be “a model for predicting a nation’s future growth more accurately than any other techniques out there.”  The model they discuss is rather sensible.  It ranks countries according to their “productive knowledge,” a concept the blog summarizes as, 

the skills, experience and general know-how that a given population acquires in producing certain goods. Countries with a high score in the report’s “economic complexity index” have acquired years of knowledge in making a variety of products and goods and also have lots of room for growth. Essentially, the more collective knowledge a country has in producing goods, the richer it is — or will be.

This focus on actual production knowledge is unique in US culture because it admits  (not explicitly, but what do you expect), to channel a sort of Marxist Whitney Houston, “workers are the future.”  At a time when we are being told that workers will increasingly lose out to robots in the coming years, it seems instructive to think less about what could happen and more about what should.  Or, more accurately, to think what might be missed in the fetishization of replacing living labor with capital intensive technologies and globalization that dominates our culture.  

Namely that the deployment of technology may be a short term labor-saving device, but it doesn’t produce new knowledge or practices in the labor process.  In the long run, not only will there be less flexibility in terms of generating profits; there will also be fewer new options generated by the labor process itself.  In a sense, I’d like to argue, what the Complexity Atlas reveals in its rating of the US is that the long run costs of Post-Fordist casualization and globalization are that it has fewer domestic resources to draw upon for future growth.  This sclerotic rentier economy is not some accident or a reasonable consequence of its maturity: it is the result of intentional policies and actions designed to destroy the power of labor, thereby limiting the possibility of increasing returns from it’s most dynamic “factor” of production.  The US remains “economically complex,” but the possibility of future growth is cut off by refusing to harness this complexity in its most elemental form.  I will lay out this argument below and then discuss what this means for not only future economic planning, but the future of higher education.

Long run economic value is not produced solely through the extraction of surplus from the labor process (i.e. it’s all about profits); instead it is the result of what the authors of the paper call the “social accumulation of productive knowledge” as applied to the productive process. 

The essential theory … is that countries grow based on the knowledge of making things,” Mr. Hausmann said in a phone interview. “It’s not years of schooling. It’s what are the products that you know how to make. And what drives growth is the difference between how much knowledge you have and how rich you are.

This gap between productive knowledge and current GDP is presumed to be one that will eventually narrow for countries near the bottom of the income ladder today—but who currently generate much of the know how at the level of production because they, well, produce a lot of stuff.  So China, which makes a lot of stuff but has a relatively low per capita GDP, has a lot of room to expand via this intellectual productive capacity; The US, which they rank at 91 out of 128, “is very rich already and has a lot of productive knowledge, but it doesn’t have an excess of productive knowledge relative to its income.”  So, in the next decade, we don’t have far to grow.

This sits nicely beside arguments like that of Tyler Cowen, in his latest book The Great Stagnation.  The widely covered thesis of this book is, basically, that we’ve picked all the low hanging fruit of technological innovation and the development of our workforce.  According to Cowen, barring some transformational breakthrough (equivalent to the internal combustion engine or electricity) countries in the west can look forward to a long period of stagnant growth.  Using their concept of economic complexity, Hausmann and Hidalgo claim that they can both explain and quantify why this is the case.  In the intro to their paper they say:

During the past two centuries, the amount of productive knowledge we hold expanded dramatically. This was not, however, an individual phenomenon. It was a collective phenomenon. As individuals we are not much more capable than our ancestors, but as societies we have developed the ability to make all that we have mentioned – and much, much more.

The authors give much of the credit for pooling this knowledge in “institutions and markets” and they speak of this productive know-how as if it is some sort of natural attribute.  They also speak of the potential economic growth possible in this mode of production as if that is also a completely natural endogenous process—as opposed to, as in the case of China, India and the countries that near the top of their index also benefitting from changes resulting from globalization.  [something here on their previous domination].

I’d like to speak to each of these, but I think the most controversial claim is that economically important knowledge is produced not through a separate science or technological process, but through the productive process itself.  In mainstream economics, the closest thing to this is the the closest thing I know to this argument is that made by Paul Romer in his pathbreaking articles of the early 1990s.  These are chronicled by David Warsh in his book Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations.  As Warsh puts it, the main paradox Romer introduces in his work is the idea that a good can be both non-rivalrous and (at least partially excludable)—and in so far as it is both, it represents a separate input into the production process.  ”Knowledge” and “technological change” are primary examples of these goods.  This paradox hinges on several premises Romer’s pivotal article introduces into the debate about growth.  First is the rather conventional assertion that technological change lies at the center of economic growth.  If we allow that technology is not just a thing, fashioned to do a job, but also includes social technologies like the division of labor, perhaps this is true (though typically when we talk about tech in this country, we’re talking about machines and gadgets.)

The second premise is more contentious: most theories of technological change consider it to be an exogenous factor—research is produced, innovation occurs, through a separate social, educational, or otherwise public R&D process, then business adopts and adapts to these changes.  Knowledge is seen as somehow exogenous to the process of economic growth, i.e. it is not created by the production process.  Romer cites Robert Solow’s assumption that knowledge was largely produced through some sort of public entity, (therefore nonexcludable and nonrival).  Romer’s argument here, is that knowledge is produced by “private, maximizing behavior.”  Romer asserts that technological innovation is both internal (or endogenous) to the production process, and that it, ”arises in large part because of intentional actions taken by people who respond to market incentives.”  Here his main targets are economists like Solow who think of technological change as a public or social good, created as an externality or spillover effect rather than an intentional, profit-maximizing initiative within the production process.  This, for Romer, sits nicely with his last point.

Romer sums up this position, by now fairly commonplace in thinking about Intellectual Property Rights and the role of technological knowledge in the Post-Industrial, Informational economy:

Once the cost of creating a new set of instructions has been incurred, the instructions can be used over and over again at no additional cost. Developing new and better instructions is equivalent to incurring a fixed cost. This property is taken to be the defining characteristic of technology. (S71)

The third premise, then, is that there is some separate good—called knowledge—that can be unbundled from the production process.   One of the key distinctions for Romer is between this design (“a new set of instructions”) and the various forms of human capital outlined by his his University of Chicago ancestor Gary Becker.  Human capital (“like the ability to add”) is a very distinctive, material good that it embodied in the individual who possesses these abilities.  The abilities must be learned and once they are learned, they can only be engaged in one task at a time.  And when the learner dies, her skills die with her.  ”Knowledge” lives on.  Though the instructions are still instantiated in some material form, their infinite, identical replication is possible, making it a much more non-rivalrous good than human capital.  In Romer’s words,

What is unambiguously true about a design is that the cost of replicating it with a drafter, a photocopier, or a disk drive is trivial compared to the cost of creating the design in the first place. This is not true of the ability to add. Training the second person to add is as costly as training the first. For simplicity, the arguments here will treat designs as idealized goods that are not tied to any physical good and can be costlessly replicated, but nothing hinges on whether this is literally true or merely close to being true (S75)

As Romer himself says, this is an “idealized” distinction, for use in analytical, mathematical models.  However, this idealized understanding of what has come to be known as Intellectual Property Rights and the role they play in trade has guided public policy on the matter right up to the present day.  In a sense, it is a fundamental distinction that is central to political economy: Romer asserts that there is some way to separate the conception of work from its execution.  Since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, owners of capital have found this idea deeply seductive: Romer finally worked out the math to illustrate its centrality.  

However, in order to do so, he had to alter one of the other fundamental assumptions of neoclassical economics: the competitive market.  As Warsh points out, these three premises only operate in the paradoxical environment of “monopoly competition.” If the development of this separate form of knowledge involved significant investment on the part of the firm, then it should be seen as a form of fixed cost.  And since these were market oriented firms, they had to deal with fixed costs as fixed costs: they had to be amortized as a business expense.

They have to cover their fixed costs—the costs of going into business in the first place, before a single item can be sold.  That means they have to be price makers. They have to act, or try to ac, at least for a time, like monopolists (217)

They are helped in their charade by the rather robust intellectual property rights system, but even Romer seems coy about whether this is absolutely necessary to the process.  More on this in a moment.

Though I admit to being completely baffled by the math Romer is probably most known for (what does a comma stand for in an economic equation?), there are several issues to pick apart in Romer’s premises.  For the sake of getting to the point, I’ll bracket the questions inspired by the first premise—the first being what exactly qualifies as a technological innovation.  As Steven Johnson’s new book articulates very well, truly productive innovations are largely context specific.  Likewise, I think he overstates the second premise, though it seems to be made in a specific context as well.  I don’t have a sense of how irregular his observation was, but the patent system in general seems to be based on this ideal of the innovative producer.  The problem, of course, is that much of the basic science research either remains undone or the product of extensive, publicly funded work at universities. This is the basic argument of Michael Perelman’s book Steal This Idea.  

For the sake of argument, I’ll agree that knowledge and technological change are transparently and causally related to economic growth and that the endogenous profit motives in some way drive it.  In that case, we arrive at the third premise, which is the crux of Romer’s deviation from the arguments of the authors of this Complexity Atlas.  Namely that there is some specific form of knowledge separable from the productive process itself.  This raises several questions.  What is the nature of this knowledge? How is it produced? How does it contribute to economic growth? and, therefore, what sorts of policies and frameworks help foster it?  

I don’t see this as a theoretical question in the least. In many ways, the world we live in today is the spitting image of the one Roemer describes.  On the one hand, as insinuated above, the idea that there is a separate, specific knowledge that can be isolated and protected from competition is the foundation for the global push for stronger intellectual property rights.  The current frameworks inevitably favor incumbents and arguably do less to create new innovation than other possible models. 

On the other hand, the reason for this strict adherence to the current intellectual property regime is that it is necessary to cement and secure the current international division of labor called globalization.  The latter is based on the idea that conception and execution can be neatly separated in space and time.  In his model, Romer explicitly divides the economy into separate sectors, one where innovation and R&D occur and another where a licensed firm performs the work of actually manufacturing the product.  As José Gabriel Palma describes it in an article on the process of deindustrialization,

In [Romer’s] models increasing returns, though generated by research-intensive activities, are explicitly not associated with manufacturing activities as such or with investment in manufacturing; nor do they allow for specific effects from manufacturing on R&D activities

This points to the overall problem with Romer’s model—and, consequently, with the model of the global economy of the last half century.  Namely, that it has forgotten the importance of the tacit knowledge the Complexity Atlas discusses.  Romer operates with an idealized belief that you can neatly separate the IPR from the tacit knowledge.  The rhetoric of the maximalist IPR critics makes it seem as if the costless replication of their products is a reality against which they must be protected. The policy recommendation is then that the state should protect IPR and invest in R&D.  These sound very reasonable from this perspective, but they remain trapped in an idealized understanding of how knowledge is produced.  As Daniele Archibugi and Andrea Filippetti argued in the Global Policy Journal in May, tacit knowledge is essential to this replication, even when there is full cooperation on both sides of the transfer: 

Most knowledge is useless to firms and organisations that do not have the ability to absorb it. In order to exploit knowledge successfully, potential users or competitors have to invest enough time, effort and resources to use it. In principle, IPRs protect the codified part of knowledge but not the tacit component. Many cooking recipes are freely available and everybody can afford a cookbook with recipes from the five continents. But this will not make good cooks of us all. In order to become good cooks, people will need equipment, ingredients, experience and talent. Industrial knowledge is not very different from the expertise required in the kitchen. The Arrow (1962) ‘paradox’ – if the potential buyers do not know the content of the information, they cannot appreciate its value, but if they know it, they do not need to buy it any longer – does not hold true for industrial and innovation-related knowledge.  As people involved in technology transfer know very well, within the branches of the same multinational corporation, even when there is much interest and goodwill to transfer best-practice techniques from one plant to another one, it takes a long time and a lot of patience to achieve the same quality and efficiency. If learning costs are so high, more attention should be paid not just to the production of knowledge, but also to what makes this knowledge exploitable for users.

Archibugi and Filippetti use this observation as an opportunity to question the reliance on IPRs to foster innovation: this undermines Romer’s argument that innovation will only happen if there is a competitive monopoly (and leads to the argument, made by Michelle Boldrin and David K. Levine which says that innovation is possible without IPRs, an important argument in the current legislative climate).  The implications of this for the future of IPR policies on a global scale should be clear: in effect, less is more.

But more importantly for the present argument, Archibugi and Filippetti effectively disputing both the second and third of Romer’s premises: #3 is undermined by saying that knowledge is created in both tacit and, to use their terms, “codified” forms; #2 by saying its production shouldn’t be left only to “the hands of profit-seeking agents:”  ”More resources should be devoted to research carried out in universities and other public institutions and greater attention should be devoted to facilitate users to acquire and apply the knowledge generated.”   

In short, there is something to the idea that producers learn in the process of production—developing the tacit knowledge Hausmann and Hidalgo find so instrumental for development.  Their conception of the way specialization helps to expand the capacities of production is straight from Adam Smith so it is likely to be widely accepted.  

The science of (worker) management

Scientists and their science made no significant visible contribution to new technology before the late nineteenth century.  Adams writes that, ‘few if any salient technologies of the Industrial Revolution can be thought of as science based in any direct sense.  They can better be described as craft based in important ways.’ 

Robert Adam’s Paths of Fire

By reducing as far as possible institutional links between the firm and its workers, by encouraging casual work, there is an danger of an even greater gap between workers and the jobs they do - workers are even less consciously involved in the fight for productivity and quality.

Separation of the conception and execution “even easier to establish between large firms and subcontractors, on an inter-regional or international level.  Large firms set up in urban areas with highly qualified, highly paid staff, monopolize the design of machines and the sale of end products, and subcontract actual manufacturing to satellite firms operating in poorer areas with widespread unemployment (37).

Lepietz goes on to point out that, while this may have short run gains in revitalizing profitablity, it turns the production chain into something like space exploration, where “modules [are] sent to Jupiter by engineers sitting behind their desks on earth.”  But this alienated form of management is only half the problem.  Because the workshop is mostly automated and the laborers more casualized, it significantly reduces both the ability and the incentive for workers who experience the workflow in real time to make any improvements to that process.  You have to rely on an outside organization (which created the expensive machine) to monitor and repair its performance while the people using it every day have no way of creating improvements at the point of production. In Lipietz’s words, “there are lower ‘on-the-spot’ productivity gains because there are no people actually working on, adjusting and improving the machines on a permanent basis” (38).  

Lipietz argument is rather sensible in terms of the downside of automation, and he provides a good example of this in relation to one of the more famous industrial struggles in the last fifty years: that of the Fiat factory in Turin.  The factory gives a lot of insight into the reasons behind automation, which often have little to do with economic efficiency or productivity gains per se.  

Turin was the flash points of the Italian workerist movement.  Central to the antagonism was the Autonomist Marxists who encouraged workers to see their political power as the primary producers in the system.  Instead of being afraid of capital and factory owners, they should challenge them head on as they were the ones whose labor produced the value for the system.  Were they to simply refuse to work, they would deprive the system of its lifeblood, lead to its demise, and then create a more just world on its ashes.  These ideas, combined with increasingly antagonistic conditions inside the factories, led to a massive strike at the Fiat plant in Turin in 1969.  

These strikes then spread beyond Turin, to encompass the whole of Northern Italy in a series of strikes and industrial disputes now referred to as the “Hot Autumn.”  Current Autonomists like Bifo Berardi claim (and other Autonomist oriented writers like Hardt and Negri concur) that these disputes were the catalyst for pushing capitalist industry to globalize and transform itself into the two tiered post-industrial economy described by Lipietz.  This certainly played a part—more on this in a moment—but for our purposes, the other interesting result was that the owners of the factory, according to Lipietz, “set up the almost totally automated workshops of Robotgate, Digitron, and LAM in order to have no workers present in the most troublesome sectors.”  This total automation was extremely expensive and, from the perspective of economics, not all that much more efficient.  

But it was politically very useful: it destroyed the power those workers had in the production process, i.e. the power they, as holders of creative, tacit knowledge, held against the owners.  As Harry Braverman points out in his book, this is the original purpose behind the Taylorist impulse towards “scientific management.”  The separation of conception from execution and the continued deskilling of workers was supposed to give more power to the owners and managers: workers were slowly de-skilled therefore reducing their leverage.  If they had no union protection, were they to protest, they could be easily replaced by unemployed workers.  In the Turin situation, not only were the workers encouraged by their understanding of their “productive knowledge,” but the slowing of immigration into that part of Italy had reduced significantly the “reserve army of the unemployed.” The choice to introduce expensive machinery was an end run strategy of management unable or unwilling to placate workers politically.  In retrospect, however, this proved to be a poor decision economically—in ways this new study echoes.  As Lipietz says,

The aim was to reestablish managerial authority; the cost of automation far exceeded the investment needed for optimal technical efficiency.  At the beginning of the 1980s, after Fiat’s ‘Fordist’ workers had been defeated, the management had to admit that ‘the LAM system, designed at the time when industrial relations had broken down, is an interesting but one-off development.  It is very expensive, it takes up a huge amount of space, and it breaks down more frequently than a less sophisticated installation.’  The alternative, which I and many employers, including Italian ones, advocate, is obviously to go for systems which are ‘less sophisticated’ but which mobilize the skills of line workers in real time, at the actual point of production.  Out goes ‘paradoxical’ involvement; in comes dialogue between machine design, machine maintenance and line production [… .]  This would mean groups of workers, highly skilled in more than one area, being able to adjust and repair machines, and to advise and even cooperate with designers.

The economic advantages of this are perfectly obvious.  The skills and know-how developed in the process of working on the factory floor would be continually infused into that process itself.  On the other hand, it shifts the balance of power back to workers so that, for their more central involvement, they are able to garner more control over their place in the work process - and how they are remunerated.  

If print on demand became widespread, publishers could cut their fixed costs and solve the perennial problem of stores returning unsold books. But that would throw into doubt almost everything else about the way big publishers conduct business, since they’re compensated based on the range of services they provide, from editorial guidance to storage and distribution. Print-on-demand technology would make it harder for the publishers to justify keeping a large majority of a book’s wholesale price.

This statement appeared in a Business Week article about Amazon’s challenge to mainstream publishing and the role of print-on-demand (POD) in that strategy.  While it has the breezy know-it-all tone of the business press, I don’t find their analysis of why big publishers aren’t doing POD to be compelling.  I don’t have the numbers myself, but to make their case, they would have to do something like compare publisher profits to the number of books they remainder or destroy from big print runs.  Otherwise, the story just comes off as what it is: empty, tech-fetishizing cheerleading for Amazon.

In any case, it misses the much larger elephant in the room, focusing only on the production of commodities rather than the production of the means of production of commodities.  In other words, the article focuses solely on the circulation of printed books rather than the extensive process necessary for a printed book to enter circulation - including but not limited to the very large machines that make it possible to sell books at wholesale prices and still make a profit.  I don’t know much about these machines, I admit, but part of what annoys me about the article is that it doesn’t provide any comparison between the productivity of the machines used in POD and that of traditional presses.  Instead it opts for looking at POD as the cure for all that ails mainstream publishing - a cure they are refusing to take because it would threaten their power.  This may be true in some way, but it may also be true that the POD option isn’t economical for mainstream publishing in the first place.

I think it is far more likely that big publishers don’t want to use POD because, on the one hand, the machines they use are likely far more efficient at printing large runs and; on the other hand, they have invested a lot in these machines and the distribution network that makes them profitable.  Big publishers don’t want to make a switch to small batch, POD publishing because they are, by definition, big publishers.  

In general, POD puzzles me.  It enters the debate about the future of publishing in an odd place.  Most people gunning for innovation in book publishing focus their energy on digital only, e-books and other e-reading platforms that will replace the printed codex as the dominant delivery mechanism for long form content.  POD seems to say all that is true, but people will likely continue to want printed books for whatever reason so we should still have a way to print books.  And for small runs or books that have a really small and/or dispersed market, it makes a lot of sense.  For the next Stephen King pulp title, not so much.

I’ve never seen any analysis about publishing that says their biggest overhead is in overprinting, warehousing, and distribution, but if these were the primary problems (or if the current solutions weren’t working) I can’t imagine they wouldn’t be doing more about it.  On the other hand, the article itself opens by noting that Amazon remains pretty invested in the warehousing and distribution of books.  In this sense, POD appears less as a model of efficiency than as one of Amazon’s strategies for distributing “the long tail.”  It is unlikely, for instance, for it to be efficient for Amazon to do POD for big bestsellers that would require huge print runs in a limited amount of time.  

I’m a little fuzzy on the larger scale POD operations mentioned in the article CreateSpace is an Amazon affiliate that will distribute independent authors’ via Kindle or POD print books.  It also aids indie musicians and moviemakers in online distribution via Amazon. Lightning Source specializes in printing small runs of books for small presses, and appears to have some of the enormous presses that likely sit in the warehouses of major publishers.  In each of these cases, the POD is only part of the bargain.  They also help some with marketing (i.e. it appears on Amazon’s webpage), distribution, and in some cases design.  As major publishers would also point out, they don’t offer anything in the way of editorial guidance or real direct marketing to bookstores or libraries, but they are still rather large scale and “full service” as publishing operations.

This is especially true when the article put these in the same category as the Espresso Book Machine (EBM), which is the perennial hero of POD stories.  It was launched almost a decade ago, though the actual machine didn’t emerge until 2007, when it was named by Time as one of the best inventions of that year. It’s is now manufactured (and serviced) by Xerox.  They started out at about $50k a pop (according to the Time article above) but now run about $100k. They will produce a book - complete with binding and full cover color - from a digital file in a little under 5 minutes, depending on the size of the book.  Video of the machine in action here.

It’s impressive as a machine, but has taken a long time to catch on.  It had only sold about 30 of the machines by 2009 and it’s parent company at the time, On Demand Books, had hoped to sell another 60 that year, with sales boosted by a partnership with Google’s public domain book search.  According to Rick Anderson, writing last August, there were only 45 machines; other sources claim there are about 70, but the website for the company currently shows it remains under 60.  Anderson claims that the low number of titles available through digital vendors limits its uptake, but he also cites a lot of technical problems they’ve had with the machine at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library, where Anderson works.  Alongside static electricity problems that the company worked out when Brigham Young University bought one, he mentions that,

It takes about five minutes to print a 300-page book — as long as the machine is warmed up. If it isn’t, you’ve got to let the glue melt, which will take 45 minutes to an hour. [… .] we had issues with balky and leaking ink jets, malfunctioning sensors, and recalcitrant cover feeds, all of which have been fixed or mostly fixed at this point. And we’re still waiting for a color text-block printer that will communicate effectively with the machine, despite having been offered that option initially. For now we’re still making do with black-and-white (we can print covers in color without any problem) 

Many of these bugs will get worked out to some degree the more people adopt them.  On the other hand, as anyone with access to an office copier can tell you, machines like these often require a lot of maintenance to keep up with the use.   Still, it doesn’t make sense to speak about the EBM in the same breath as industrial size initiatives like Lightning Source.  And it is hard to see either as viable alternatives to the scale of major printing operations of mainstream publishers.  Maybe I’m wrong, but these sound like apples and oranges.  

Certainly for some publications, for instance academic monographs, it makes a good deal of sense if it is also paired with digital distribution.  Adding currently out of print titles would also be a fantastic gift - as the Utah Library found when they were able to print out a 300 year old German manuscript for a faculty member there.  In other words, anything that couldn’t be efficiently printed at scale.  But almost by definition, none of these are the purview of the major houses Business Week claims are challenged by this model.  

While it is just one story, it is of a type in that it looks for disruptive technology as the leading edge of cultural and social change, rather than thinking of it as a part of a total strategy that would make little sense outside of that strategy.  At the same time, it ignores far more significant social and cultural disruptions.  For instance, is it more important that Amazon offers print on demand or that Amazon offers authors a 70% royalty rate for Kindle books?  One could argue that they aren’t all that distinct.  If an author was reticent about signing onto Amazon’s platform for that price - say, for instance, because they also want their book in print - having the print on demand is a nice backup.  If your ultimate goal is to get out of the pulp business altogether - and slash those labor costs for warehousing and shipping - then POD is useful to entice more first time authors to the platform.  On the other hand, if your business is the pulp business, it hardly makes sense to try retrofitting your infrastructure after the fact.

None of this points to the real disruptions that these emergent models suggest: namely,  is there still need for editorial input in the publishing process? And what are the archival and historical consequences of a model like Amazon’s POD taking hold? Both of these are questions with widespread implications, ranging from mainstream publishing that is the subject of this article, to scholarly communication, which is under increasing pressure to be open source.  Having a big stack of print books may be less and less important for bookstores, libraries, and publishers in the future, but this will not eliminate the extensive human input that goes into creating, curating, and preserving content.  

Right now, the argument remains superficially focused on technologies that will likely never catch on completely.  It should be focused on instances where Amazon - or other publishers - help to create alternative institutions that fulfill these more essential functions - functions that often cost a lot more than amortize in the short term and often continue to cost money long afterwards.  The longer we think about this as a decision to be made by clashing industrial titans instead of broad social questions requiring deliberation and concerted action, the less the answer we get will reflect anything approaching a thoughtful solution for the future.

There’s a dangerous group of anti­copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What’s more, they’re powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.

I’m speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.

If you haven’t checked out Cory Doctorow’s novel Makers, it is a very easy read - easing you into what Stephen Johnson might call the “adjacent possible” of the contemporary world.  The drama is mostly about the drama of enterpreneurship and culture at large, especially as Doctorow looks only slightly ahead at the shifts coming down the pike.  In a sense it is a hopeful book, at least so far (I’m only to the first 22%, or so the Kindle App tells me); it tracks a reporter from the San Jose Mercury News as she becomes a key part of a  distributed-micro-industry innovation lab.  As the economic and social institutions around them are collapsing, “the Makers” at the center of the story (including said reporter) must dig deep for the animal spirits that allow them to leap towards what appear to be emergent cultural formations - new forms of cultural, social, and economic sustenance - that end up serving them better, even if they find themselves in a more precarious position.

One could say it is a sort of autobiographical novel as Doctorow is a good example of this trend.  He is central figure in our own cultural drama, or at least a key touchstone in the shifts of the last decade.  In addition to firing off a novel every once in a while, he edits Boing Boing, participates in many other fora and speaking venues, and worked for a time with EFF.  I am sure that somewhere in his background, Doctorow did what many of us do - think about how you will connect the stuff that you do to the stuff people will pay for, thus making it possible to make money, buy stuff, and live.  But when you look at just his “publications” section on his Wikipedia entry, it is clear that he must concentrate almost totally with producing stuff - as his characters do in the novel, just making.  I know he must be savvy about how he makes connections from time to time - looking for a contract to do this or that - but it seems like his primary strategy has been to create value over and over again and assume that one way or another something will start flowing back the other way.  I’m sure this is mostly just me being so taken by the persona that I forget all my background in political economy of communication.  

Whatever the actual history, this image is bolstered by the distribution of his books, basically for free.  As someone who has done a good bit of writing, little of it garnering the kind of attention that would put food on the table, there is something this demonstrates for me very clearly.  The rhythm of production in the traditional publication cycle is sort of like the pattern of work in the academic field:

  1. work very hard in extended bursts
  2. send stuff to the publisher
  3. get no work done because you are waiting to hear from the publisher about the last piece instead of working on the next piece.
  4. realize you’re wasting your time since you won’t hear back anytime soon
  5. suddenly get back to working very hard

A variation of this happened initially when I put stuff on this blog. I’ve had blogs for several years (both of these 1, 2  since 2004) and have never had more than a few comments (and only recently more than a few page views- though they are probably robots).  But I’ve not really devoted energy to putting out content.  I always figured my lack of notice must simply be the lack of a continued stream of content.

As I started posting at a higher rate (at least for me) I thought a critical mass would simply arrive here, enchanted by some part of the operation or struck by a random insight I didn’t even know I was making.  Then the traffic would begin arriving more regularly and my only concern would be keeping them.  Those would be the days!

I bracket for the moment whether those would actually be “the days.”  But needless to say, the traffic has never arrived and publishers and editors continue to operate on a print time schedule, which makes every hour of waiting seem like a week.  The temptation each time you write something you feel proud of is to rest on your personal laurels, to concentrate on self promotion, on pushing the content you’ve created - send it to the publisher, to the journal, to the blog, to the silent Twitter followers who might happen to be watching your timeline, happen to click through, happen to read, like, share, BOOM!  

This is necessary, obviously, and the more your food depends on it, the faster you write and self promote, ignoring personal relationships, exercise, sleep, and so on.  But the makers of the story - and perhaps Doctorow himself - concentrate less on the pressure from the market: they seem to make because they like making and to them flow unexpected rewards.  This is the ideal of the balanced copyright/open access/creative commons crowd: this stuff will get made, people will make it because they want to.  The goal is to share it, pass it on, get it out there in the mix so that it can be used, made new.  

The people who do the making will be rewarded indirectly - or in some innovative way compared to what we understand today.  The techno-facilitated, found-object sculptors at the center of the story used to sell one-of -a-kind art objects, but a business manager and startup capital helps them reframe their understanding of production so that they embrace a neocapitalist ideal of mass production leading to lower cost products for the most impoverished among us.  In the process, they get paid and are able to help some of the impoverished among them to become dynamic, (useful, responsible) makers in their own right.  Win win.

The journo quits her newspaper job and takes a risk on blogging for banner ad revenue - becoming so popular that every random person she bumps into is one of her readers. In addition to making enough to survive, she seemingly singlehandedly shifts the cultural perception of what the future holds by the passionate, energetic reportage she provides.  She just continues to push content, thinking barely at all about what she will do now that she, a 45 year-old woman, doesn’t have a stable job or health insurance.  Her only threat becomes a rival journalist who threatens to devalorize the cultural system she has helped create by spouting reactionary critiques of the enterprise.  In the long run, this might threaten her livelihood, but at the moment it is just a threat to her ethos.  Occasionally she worries about whether this is affecting her objectivity, but only when it involves sex with her subjects or direct payment (I’m sure there is some gender dynamic to explore here, with a male writing the inner dialogue of this female.)  Never does questioning the larger cultural shift become her anxiety.  Again, there is 80% of the book left. Lots of room for reflection, but so far that’s not part of the recipe.

Returning to the opening quote, is about a topic near and dear to my heart - licensing electronic resources. I initially intended to point out this particular emphasis, perhaps following with the next two paragraphs in his intro to “Makers.”

These people don’t believe in copyright law.  Copyright law says that when you buy a book, you  own it. You can give it away, you can lend it, you  can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to  the local homeless shelter. Owning books has been  around for longer than publishing books has.  Copyright law has always recognized your right to  own your books. When copyright laws are made—  by elected officials, acting for the public good—  they always safeguard this right.  

But ebook publishers don’t respect copyright law,  and they don’t believe in your right to own  property. Instead, they say that when you “buy” an  ebook, you’re really only licensing that book, and  that copyright law is superseded by the thousands  of farcical, abusive words in the license agreement  you click through on the way to sealing the deal.

I completely agree with his assessment of this situation - and it makes me quite nervous when thinking about what this perverted infrastructure will do to the library ecology in the future, a topic Doctorow himself has recently written on in relation to consumers’ personal libraries of DRM protected, device specific e-books (and the economic monopoly this entails).  However, on a more personal level, I can also understand why Doctorow feels confident bucking it.  In fact, it is against his basic business model to have his book protected by DRM or even have a license that would prevent him from sending around every bit of data he’d created to any person that might be interested.  

The idea is to make, make, make; share, share, share; and eventually the good will come back to you. Lewis Hyde and others have appropriated Mauss’ notion of the gift exchange model, which values people and their contributions differently, relying on cultural and social supports more than disembedded market relations. The key to this framework is not that it relies upon relationships but that, unlike the market of commodities, the relationships that the exchange creates are at the primary function of the exchange, rather than hidden by the commodity fetish.  The gift exchange revolves around the value of reciprocity and trust - values that also animate David Graeber’s book Debt (which is also available in ebook format, just for $20).  This commonality shouldn’t be surprising since both rely on Mauss for inspiriation.  In the gift economy it is somewhat crass to be straightforward about what you expect from someone in exchange for something you give as a gift.  You give the gift in order to maintain or open up a relationship and their reciprocal act of giving you a gift is evidence of how highly they value that relationship.  I was first introduced to this idea by Bourdieu, who pointed out that time also figured into it: if you immediately gave the gift back, you were obviously just giving the gift to fulfill an obligation.  Reciprocating quickly absolves you from debt and ends the relationship before it could begin.  But failing to reciprocate quickly enough - or not at all - makes it evident that you don’t value the relationship as such.  These dynamics still govern most of our personal interactions, with elaborate rules still baffling most of us (i.e. me) as we shuttle between the different value systems of our different social groupings. 

For Doctorow and others in his position, however it becomes an even more metaphysical process.  Cory doesn’t send me, Sean, a book. He doesn’t rely on, for instance, my offering him a place to sleep when he comes to Austin or for me to buy him dinner or a drink simply because he’s written this entertaining novel - though this may work out for him, it is probably not his strategy for survival just yet.  Instead, he sends the book to everyone and hopes that somehow, someway, someone will hook him up.  It is a one to many to one gift exchange that is unique to cultural objects of this kind.  Of course, buffoons like Thomas Friedman likely get this kind of treatment as well, along with fancy book contracts, but there seems to be a moral obligation here that takes economic self interest to another degree of removal.

Copyright gets in the way of the make-promote cycle.  It creates an extra step of bureaucracy to the flow of creation and self promotion.  DRM is even worse because it adds technology to that step of bureaucracy.  All of these violate the unique laws of gift exchange that seem to dominate Doctorow’s model of self sustenance.  

In the book, it is  also inherent to the “makers” themselves, whose primary business model is to concentrate on the making not the rentier ownership of the IPR (though this could certainly figure more centrally into the book - as both an obstacle to the making and a problem of remuneration.)  Still, whatever patent claims they could declare, makers come up with a new idea and milk it for all they can until someone can PRODUCE it cheaper.  Then they move onto the next idea.  That idea, like all ideas, is free to circulate and be improved upon.

In a subtle way, the entire utopia is built on the notion that an IPR-free world would be such a dynamic and creative form of capitalism that it would almost operate as a form of gift exchange.  It leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but his unequivocal disdain for IPR rentiers like ebook publishers is more than just a punchy meta-critique on his chosen format: it is a starting point that is threaded through the entire narrative.  Like most narratives that take this as their starting point, the precarity of material existence is bracketed as a non issue, as are politics of labor, family, and property.  Still, as an abstract experiment it is effective.

And either way, I think the quote above is one that should be plastered on every nascent platform of e-publishing, which effectively undermines even copyright with nearly criminal terms of licensing.  What is surprising is how little protest these publishers are receiving as of yet.  It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

The emergence of Netflix and other digital distributors such as Amazon and Hulu was initially viewed as a threat to traditional television companies. Instead, new digital entrants have been reliable buyers of syndicated shows and in particular serialised shows, which in syndication terms have traditionally not performed as well as stand-alone sitcoms and dramas. “The industry’s figured out how to use online without killing the golden goose,” Nathanson says.
The story above the “fold” on Larry David is fun for fans, but the overview of syndication rights is something all of us should understand.  This dual stream of income will soon get combined in some way - USA and TNT will buy or start an online platform or Hulu will start a cable channel or a more structured TV over internet service with full programming features.  Either way, the point to be made is that the way to treat new technology is to adapt business models - not to sue them out of commission.  Or, from the other perspective, that since the big kids own the “long tail” of our culture, we won’t be kicking them off the playground anytime soon.

Source: ft.com

The global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the contemporary publishing industry. It cannot be, not with the current business models and the prices. The users of library.nu - these barbarians at the gate of the publishing industry and the university - are legion. They live all over the world, but especially in Latin and South America, in China, in Eastern Europe, in Africa and in India. It’s hard to get accurate numbers, but any perusal of the tweets mentioning library.nu or the comments on blog posts about it reveal that the main users of the site are the global middle class

From Christopher Kelty’s excellent overview of what the shutdown of library.nu means.  Of course I think it’s excellent because he mostly repeats the points I made in my post on the closure the day after it happened.  I don’t know if I’d call all of the users middle class, but I guess by global standards anyone with access to a computer and time enough to fiddle around with digital books is fairly affluent.  In any case, the point he makes at the end about the pricing structure is almost identical to that of the MPEE contentions - except that Kelty mistakes the strategy of high pricing as being solely an attempt to limit the market to high income countries.  

I think they’d rather have a global market, but since it is a global digital market no matter what they do, they can’t tier the prices in emerging economies to make these books more accessible there without also making them cheaper for us in the global North.  Since the latter is still the main source of their income, they are in a pinch. This is also why they saw the shutdown of the library as a success - not because the global community of scholars was relying upon it, but because a student down the road at UT might opt for a free textbook rather than the overpriced one in the campus bookstore. 

Still, the comparison with AIDS meds at the end is apt if only because the country at the center of that controversy - South Africa - is also home to a thriving market of contraband textbooks.  As I mentioned in my post, the MPEE report mentions South Africa in this context.  The two are, as Kelty says, very different.  Few people die because they don’t have access to a textbook.  

But they are quite similar in the homology of the relationship between what we might call their autonomous fields and the economic field.  Bourdieu long ago pointed out, in separate places, the way that both the cultural field - things like art, media, and, in this case, scholarly communication - and the scientific field (pdf) - research for things like medicines, technological improvements, and even basic science - are governed by unique sets of local standards that have a particular relationship with the economic field as such.  

To take the Cultural field of production as an example, Bourdieu claimed it was, in effect “the economic world in reverse.”  This had (at least) two meanings for him. On the one hand, he used it to discuss the way a specific kind of capital governed the market for art and culture such that practitioners were seen as more legitimate the further they could distance themselves from a purely economic goal.  In other words, the finest art or culture is that which has the least commercial value - or, more accurately, the least interest in achieving short term economic gain.  This is, importantly, in the context of French culture shortly after the postwar era.  In this context, those who were clearly aiming for some popular commercial audience were seen as philistine golddiggers rather than artists dedicated to the spirit of their craft.  This is a difficult thing to grasp in a US context, where most of our cultural institutions seem to take market success as a sort of democratic tally adding up to quality or at least cultural significance (e.g. every Monday morning we’re treated to news of the weekend’s box office take, the reports hinting at this being an index of true culture.)  But we are also familiar with what this means in precisely that market: when the Monday morning returns are delighted by the size or longevity of a small independent (e.g. “quality”) film’s showing at the box office polls.

In academic publishing - though textbooks are supposed to be a bit more profitable - the general ethos is, as Kelty suggests, geared more towards creating, “a world of reading, learning, thinking and scholarship.”  For the generation of academic knowledge - be it the highly technical knowledge of science textbooks, or the deeper investigations of human history, society, and meaning in the humanities - we have built, over many long centuries, a set of institutions that are meant to be, for better or worse, somewhat immune from the demands of the state or the market.  Though the supports for this are dwindling and the ideal is quickly slipping away, the central mechanism of this was to provide scholars a stipend of time with which they could do these investigations - investigations which they would effectively provide for free in order to advance the goal of human enlightenment. 

In this way, the cultural field is very similar to the scientific field.  Both are often seen as most legitimate (among the people in the field anyway) when they are not aiming at commercial gain alone.  Scientists are supposed to be rigorous in avoiding conflicts of interest which would nullify their objective investigation of scientific fact.  And, in the case of developing pharmaceuticals, their main goal is supposed to be the curing of human ailments, with the profit generation resulting from this activity secondary.  Therefore, in both cases the ethos of the creators - and of the field of that creation - bears some moral weight in the arguments about how those creations should be distributed.  If scholarly publications or patented medicines are kept out of reach by seemingly arbitrary IPR laws, it seems an affront to the ultimate goals of these fields.

Maximalist critics might say that IPR helps protect not only profits but the sustainability of the enterprise itself, but when Elsevier has a profit margin of 36% and the industry average for Pharma is 19% it’s hard to argue that the prices couldn’t come down a bit without harming the industry - particularly when a good portion of the value of both is produced by publicly funded researchers.  The disconnect, therefore, between the stated values of the field and the monopolistic fashion its wares are distributed creates a clear moral dilemma which the letter of the law alone can do little to mitigate.

 Another sense of the idea of the economic world in reverse, however, shows why so much is at stake for these IPR hungry corporations - and, perhaps, an insight into the kind of investment that is necessary for the creation of valuable human knowledge and culture. Bourdieu was speaking about a different set of market orientations in a particular market - more geared towards the future gains, rather than short term rewards.  The overall arguments of the book are muddled together in my memory, but he presents Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot as a particularly illustrative of the strategy of something like “true culture” publishers.  These publishers, on the one hand, might be seen as closer to the ethos of the field of cultural production - they publish somewhat esoteric, high culture works that may have a small audience today.  But over the long term, they may actually even out: works like Godot have a longer shelf life, and may sell for many years afterwards.  While this could be seen as an early iteration of what we now understand as something like the long tail, it is really an observation about more fundamental cultural conversations.  Godot will likely not go out of print for some time because it remains an important cultural landmark.  

Perhaps best illustrating his argument (and the stakes the publishing industry has in this reversal) is the process one would need to go through to read this essay by Bourdieu in its original, 1983 publication.  If you were not a scholar whose library paid the fee for archival access to the journal Poetics, you would need to shell out about $40, paid to Elsevier, which now owns the rights to the journal.  That’s a hefty chunk of change for a 30 year-old, 40 page academic article - particularly when you consider that it was later collected in Bourdieu’s book on the topic, meaning that, for $18 or so you can pick up the $40 article along with some priced individually at $40, $14, $25 (for one day of viewing on your computer); others apparently unavailable online or only to subscribers of the journal; and several translated for the first time in the book.  It sounds like a tremendous bargain, except if you consider that the prices are really meant to be fear inducing security gates meant to compel not first world customers per se, but first world academic libraries into signing onto “Big Deal” packages, for which the per article value is significantly better. 

Like the small independent publishers that first published Beckett’s play, these journals likely had no intention of ever charging $40 for someone to read this article by Bourdieu.  At the time, publishing the article from a well known sociologist was important for the prestige it gave to the journal in terms of the journal’s place in the field of scholarly argument.  I can’t find a history of, for instance, the journal Poetics, but I would assume Elsevier had little to do with publishing this article initially: they just acquired the rights to its back catalog, just as small independent studios eventually go out of business or are otherwise acquired by larger ones, who then acquire the rights to their back catalog.  This back catalog becomes extra valuable precisely because of this long cultural value for these scholarly arguments.  Acquiring these rights becomes almost like an aristocratic title in the feudal age: with the right lawyers and enough fear, you can create a regular flow of capital from property whose value you’ve done little to create or improve.  The economic world in reverse is reversed to become the economic world per se.

While Elsevier and JSTOR, two of the owners/distributors of articles in this collection, are surely responsible for adding some value to the article after the fact - when Bourdieu’s article from Poetics wend online in 2002, it arguably became more useful as a resource than before (though at $40, it is of limited availability).  They would argue that their work to digitize the article and create infrastructure for its discoverability is a significant improvement, worthy of the hefty fee they are charging for it.  But the same could be said for the infrastructure the volunteers at library.nu helped create for their free works.  It is true that it was not as impressive as that of an Elsevier journal, but it certainly was impressive and functional enough for Elsevier to join with a number of other international publishers to have it shut down.

In effect what we have is a continued market failure in these areas.  Market failure is a concept that is only relevant to a fully commodified society dreamed of by libertarians and neoclassical economists - i.e. where the market is said to best supply our social necessities.  Market failure refers to the failure of the market to supply a necessary (and possible) social good because the production and distribution of latter good fails to satisfy the needs of for-profit corporations to bring it to market - or, from the other direction, when the needs of for-profit corporations make it virtually impossible to legally meet the demand at the level theoretically possible in the case of immaterial goods.  Kelty sees this as a crisis in the business model of publishing; but with the general attempt to base the accumulation of global wealth on the frail infrastructure of IPR it seems clear that this is a more fundamental kind of failure, one that will likely take a long time to unwind before we fully understand its ramifications.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of new pirate sites cropping up.  For those of you who discover them, please keep a low profile. The lawyers are watching now and they want to get paid even more than the publishers.

Library.nu: Modern era’s “Destruction of the Library of Alexandria”

The description above may come as a surprise to people who never sampled the wares of this fantastic resource.  But the description, made by someone named Samir Huseyn on Twitter earlier today, is a fitting one.  It was likely nowhere near as extensive as the library of Alexandria, but the last time I visited, it had thousands of pages and likely almost 100k objects in its catalog (according to the story below it was over 400k).  But for the global patrons it served its most attractive quality was that it served them all up for free.

As of yesterday morning, the library.nu is no more.  For the past 24 hours, dedicated users and community members scrambled to find out what had happened to it.  Over the past few weeks, there have been dramatic changes to the login interface.  At first, the login page would display nothing in the way of the works behind it; then a week or so ago the previous login page was replaced altogether: now library.nu pretended to be a “book review site,” displaying only the reviews members had left of the pirated works they previously dispensed.  By Monday morning, the site was dead, its member rolls purged to prevent login from the direct link, the main page (ironically?) redirected to the Google Books frontpage, and the admin email producing an automated response:

I started watching the Twitter feed for “#library.nu” or its alias gigapedia.info for any word of what had happened.  My first difficulty was finding anything about it in English. Amidst the Chinese, Korean, Continental and Eastern European languages, there was an occasional English tweet, but most of these were of the “WTF?” variety: no more info except a confirmation that something was going on.  A post on a Spanish language blog confirmed that there was something amiss, though that was last week.  Like many previous tweets - or the English ones I could read - what these actually illustrated was less that there was something wrong with the site and more that there was a deep, globally felt felt fear that something might happen to it.  With Megaupload, BTjunkie, Pirate Bay, and other sites falling (even, as it were, in a SOPA-free world) recently, it was a reasonable concern.

This morning, it finally came out (first in Italian then German then English)

An international alliance of publishers, including Cambridge University Press, Elsevier and Pearson Education Ltd, has served successful cease-and-desist orders on a piracy operation with an estimated turnover of £7m

The two platforms, sharehoster service www.ifile.it and link library www.library.nu, had together created an “internet library” making more than 400,000 e-books available as free illegal downloads. The operators generated an estimated turnover of €8m (£6.7m) through advertising, donations and sales of premium-level accounts, according to a report by German law firm Lausen which helped co-ordinate the alliance.

The other publishers involved also comprised Georg Thieme; HarperCollins; Hogrefe; Macmillan Publishers Ltd; Cengage Learning; John Wiley & Sons;the McGraw-Hill Companies; Pearson Education Inc; Oxford University Press; Springer; Taylor & Francis; C H Beck; and Walter De Gruyter. The alliance was also co-ordinated by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association (Börsenverein) and the International Publishers Association (IPA),

If the list above seems like an unlikely bunch of transnational interests, that’s only because you never visited this library.  It mostly trafficked in science and engineering textbooks (like many such sites) with an abundance of other monographs and trade titles, including enormous collections of journal articles and the latest epub and .mobi encoded editions of bestsellers.  These were all carefully cataloged, with metadata linking them to subject headings, a description telling you what kind of text it was - whether it was merely a page image capture, one with OCR making it searchable, or a fully digital, publication quality pdf.   

None of the files for these books, however, were archived on the site.  As the news reports allege - and as several astute users identified early on - there seemed to be a direct linkage between the locker site ifile.it and library.nu.  Many files were mirrored on both ifile.it and mediafire, but all of them were at least hosted on the .it site, perhaps signaling the reason the Italian Publishing Association was one of the first parties included in the crackdown (according, anyway, to my rough translation of the Italian news releases.)  And though there wasn’t advertising on the library.nu site, major advertisers (some of whom seem to be party to the crackdown, others like Hotels.com are less directly involved) placed prominent ads on the pages of ifile.it.  It’s actually quite sensible that they be connected, though I’m sure the actual legal and financial arrangement is more complicated: why go to the trouble of separating these if it could be easily demonstrated all the money was going to the same pot?

In any case, as with the Megaupload take down (and many others before that) the overall haul of the operators is hard to pin down - is £7m the turnover in one year? Throughout the life of the site? Does it include operating costs for hosting the 400,000 works?  And, since this is a coalition of international publishers (or at least an international coalition of publishers) what percentage of their income does this £7m represent?  I suspect the reason there is even mention of this amount is that this is the most important thing they can charge: simply giving away files is a tough thing to prosecute unless you can also prove there was some ill-gotten loot on the part of these IPR thieves.  On the other hand, there are clearly other relationships here.  I don’t know what ebooksclub.org is, but most of the obvious publication grade pdfs were, at least for a time, given a prefix indicating they were from that site.  That site now defaults to library.nu, so maybe this is another layer of the operation.

I don’t want to get wrapped up in the INTERPOL intrigue - though I’m glad to have some more insight into how the operation functioned behind the scenes, from here on out the media story will be mostly focus on vilifying them for trying to fill an important but underserved niche.  It isn’t merely, as the news stories so far have dutifully reported verbatim from the press release, that these are “freeloaders who make unjustified profits by depriving authors and publishers of their due reward.”   And it is laughable to claim that this takedown will create, “a more transparent, honest and fair trade of digital content on the Internet.”  As the music and movie industry have demonstrated, giving more power to rightsholders is usually the best way to create a more opaque, monopolistic and ultimately unfair trade in digital content.  

None of this is to say that the International Publishers Association isn’t perfectly correct in calling this an illegal operation and its main owners “criminal” (though “highly criminal” seems a stretch); it was very likely illegal.  Whether this is right or not is another question entirely.  But this wasn’t just a “lucrative operation” (we don’t actually know how much it cost to operate it, and if the MPEE study of torrent sites is any guide, there were likely lots of costs involved since they were paying for actual hosting. UPDATE on this from Torrent Freak says they barely covered hosting costs)  If it was in any way “organized copyright crime” it was organized in a very widespread way, with community members encouraged to submit their resources to the site to be cataloged and stored.  More importantly, it obviously served a need, particularly in what the MPEE calls “Emerging Economies.” In looking at the global outcry on the Twitter feed, it is clear that many people in foreign markets relied upon this as an important resource.

For me, it is mostly an inconvenience.  Instead of being able to easily find and quote a passage from a digital copy, I’ll have to take the time to find a print copy from my bookshelf or my library. Then I’ll have to type the whole damn thing like someone from the 1950s.   Like most first world pirates, I’m as likely to buy a print copy once I download a digital one, if I haven’t already bought it). And since most of my interests are in the humanities and social sciences, I will rarely find a book I absolutely couldn’t afford to buy (though I’ve come across a few).  But for many people in more dire straits, the loss of this library represents not just the loss of an intellectual resource, it may mean the difference between being able to afford their schooling or not.  

On this front, even in the first world students have faced increasing textbook costs and as Audrey Watters points out, etextbooks have been a very poor replacement precisely because they actually exacerbate the cost.  Not only are they no less expensive, but they can’t be shared, or sold, or bought used.  Add to that that they have less functionality than a regular textbook (for the most part you can’t annotate them well and no one supplier has all of them: instead of going to one bookstore for all classes, they have to make deals with different vendors with different interfaces) and it makes it so that even the people who could afford to prefer an e-text over a real one would be more likely to look for it elsewhere.  

The most exciting venture on this front in the legit, publisher owned e-textbook world is at Indiana University.  It is a fine project in its own way - they’ve developed an HTML5 hosting platform that allows for lots of cool highlighting and social sharing options -  but to listen to the IT head who had to negotiate the deal it had a lot more to do with lawyers than educators.  For one thing, they had to join with several other schools to make it possible and negotiate as a group.  All of the other schools were also large universities and the lawyers trying to make arrangements with just five publishers racked up a hefty bill.  With all this heft, the only way they were able to negotiate a slightly reduced price for the content they were accessing was by forcing every student to buy the book - no used books, no shared books, no borrowed books: the cost of the e-textbook is included as a course fee charged to every student in the course.  And they are allowed access to it through a University portal for as long as they are in college, then they no longer have access to the text.  

All of this for saving an “average” of $25/textbooks, meaning if you happen to be one of the 5300 students in the program who takes all the classes in the program, then you will average that savings; if you’re only taking one of them, you might be saving a great deal less.  It’s a good plan for students like Obama’s health plan will be for the uninsured: you’re forced into a plan that prioritizes corporate largess over its human priorities, but at least you get served.  As the New York Times put it, it is a program which “Focuses on Bulk Savings, not iBooks.”  Or, in the words of the IT head, Osborne

The model is agreeable to publishers and authors because they are guaranteed income that would otherwise be lost if students bought used textbooks. “We thought, ‘What if we made a model that gives money to the publisher and the author every year, provided it’s low enough for students to afford?’ ” Mr. Osborne said on Thursday.

I’m not faulting Osborne for beginning from what would be good for publishers: though his primary mission is to his students, he realizes that the only way he can even begin to imagine serving them, is if he starts by considering what would be good for the rightsholders that effectively make all the rules in this environment.  Only by beginning from what will make them happy can he hope to serve his educational mission.  

So far, we’re still in the relatively developed world. What led me to library.nu yesterday was discussions I had with a few people about the new open education courses at MIT, through their platform MITx.  It is basically an extension campus on the web, only you may or may not be able to turn it into a credential.  They don’t seem to be aiming as high as the Stanford AI MOOC that led to around 500,000 students starting the course at some point (only 30,000 or so finished.)  But it is still billed as a good, economical way to get the information.  More importantly, in the higher ed-tech-disruption circles, it is seen as more evidence that online is the wave of the future.  

But scroll through the course and you find that the textbook is written by the professor - but owned by Elsevier.  There are excerpts from the text on the website, but if you want the whole book, you have to buy it from Amazon or the publisher.  So students might be able to take a free class, which may or may not get them any closer to a college degree, but if they really want to understand the material, they have to buy an $85 textbook.  I suppose it is a small price to pay for a college class, but a cynic could point out (not me, of course) that it’s also a fantastic way to sell more books.

Again, I don’t fault the professor or the institution for trying to work this out in an above board, satisfactory fashion.  Elsevier has powerful propagandists and likely much more powerful lawyers: they consistently preach a doctrine justifying their 35% profit margin by speaking of the incredible value they add to the works they publish - and if you ever stop believing, they remind you how much you’d need to pay to absolve your wayward soul.  Even if you wanted to argue - you couldn’t.  In any case, this is a very special arrangement that has to be made for this model to work.  If the only classes schools can offer online are those where the professor has written the main text, it might be a slim set of offerings indeed: hardly the basis for a new model of education.  And, again, central to it is the problem of the textbook.

The outside option here is that schools start using open educational resources, and there is a large movement around this as well - both schools trying to develop them and educators developing texts to use.  If this was a more common practice, it might begin to eat away at the smug satisfaction textbook publishers must feel when they walk away from delivering a deal that so cravenly favors them over students.  Preventing a shred of (their own) humility is the main goal of these publishers, which is why library.nu was so important to eliminate.

Once we slip the heavily fortified borders of the so called First World, the existence of library.nu is easily explained by the same situation that the Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report does for movies and music “piracy.”  

Multinational pricing in emerging economies, [in contrast with domestic], signals two rather different goals: (1) to protect the pricing structure in the high-income countries that generate most of their profits and (2) to maintain dominant positions in developing markets as local incomes slowly rise. Such strategies are profit maximizing across a global market rather than a domestic one, and this difference has precluded real price competition in middle- and low-income countries. Outside some very narrow contexts, multinationals have not challenged the high-price/small-market dynamic common to emerging markets. They haven’t had to.

In other words, multinational companies have to protect their price gauging at home by making sure there aren’t pirated works available in the global, digital marketplace: if you are a regular old student, you might just avoid the hassle altogether and get a digital copy.  The more widespread this practice became, the more acceptable, the less money they would be able to force from each student, at least on average.  So they have to kill a service when it grows, not because it threatens their international market per se, but because it threatens the one at home.

Likewise, this means they have to be careful about even the price of legal textbooks in markets of middle- and low-income students (at home and abroad) (especially in technical fields where the cultural discount doesn’t eat into its global value, i.e. the English version could suffice worldwide).  Even if the textbook was just marginally cheaper across a border or two, core students might be tempted to have one shipped - or an enterprising businessperson could start some sort of portal where the cheapest textbooks in the world are shipped everywhere else.  

Maybe something like this already exists, but the price of US (and European) textbooks is targeted at their core market in roughly the same way are the goods of the movie and music industries that are the main subjects of the MPEE.  This means that, for people who live in a market like South Africa, political, economic, and racial restrictions and divisions make (or have made) affordable textbooks hard to come by.  As the report notes, in South Africa,

Textbook piracy remained ubiquitous and, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), was responsible for larger total losses than either film or music piracy throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

mind you, this was before digitization.  I suppose if students there want affordable, legal, knockoff textbooks, they’ll have to get Bono to beg for them like he did for AIDS generics. Or they could just head over to library.nu.  Or could have. 

I’m not defending criminal behavior, but as I’ve said before, economic realities mitigate against a clear definition of just what is criminal in this context.  Whatever the juridical shortcomings of the digital library they made possible, it was the easiest way for anyone to get digital content from these publishers, even if they wanted to pay top dollar.  And a quick glance at the nationalities or at least linguistic diversity of its mourners on Twitter should exhibit how wide a potential public it could serve.  This was a working model of the library of the future; a functional collection that made education and exploration possible in unheard of fashion, but still needed vast improvement (and, of course, a legal license.)

In some ways, its (possibly) ironic redirect to Google Books is a sly nod to its brethren.  Where Google Books - and its settlement with publishers - fails, it picks up the slack.  Hate searching for passages in a book and only being treated to snippets because a publisher demanded it: search in Google Books, then stroll over to the library.nu and actually be albe to read a couple of pages around it - like all of them.  

In enormous servers, in buildings around the world, are all the books.  Archive.org has them; Google has them; Hathi has them; and those they don’t have they’re adding every day.  But instead of being able to magically call them up on your device using the contemporary technology in all its glory, like a chump you still have to putter around trying to find where a digital version can be legally bought in a format you can load onto your e-reader with a set of rights even remotely resembling those you would get for roughly the same price in a physical book, i.e. you can mark it, save it, sell it, lend it,  give it away to Goodwill or send it to poor kids in South Africa.  In other words, most of the time you have to sit back and bide your time until the pirates really sink this ship and make it possible for literature, libraries, scholarship, and reading to move into the 21st century for the bulk of the world’s population.  Today, for all its faults, we lost one important trailblazer for that future.  As one Tweet put it:

The upside of total human annihilation for creative alien scavengers of the future

I would like to start a journey - towards thinking about the library of the future - with what might be a peculiar example.  P.D. James begins her novel The Children of Men with an explanation of the tragedy that has befallen humankind in the late twentieth century: “For all our knowledge, our intelligence, our power, we can no longer do what the animals do without thought.”  Namely, they are unable to reproduce.  The story opens in the year 2021 with the observation that the last human born of natural birth – to a mother in the Brazilian favelas 25 years earlier – has died.  The finality of this young man’s death, what it signifies as a milestone in the history - and the future - of the human species, is part of what prompts the narrator’s reflection.  

The future, in this case, is one in which the human species no longer exists.  This presents a vexing question that we often pose in relation to individuals, but rarely in relation to entire cultures, societies, or even species: what would you do if you knew you were going to die?  Live it up with all the drugs and meaningless sex you can muster. Travel to all the places you always meant to go. Finally and fully engage in a deeper relationship with a supernatural diety or earthly soul mate.  The answers to these questions animate James’ account in lively ways, particularly in relation to the inhumanity that seems only possible on a grand scale of an entire society – when fascism, violence, hate, and xenophobia see little need to hide themselves for the sake of posterity.

But in a sense the exhaustive variety of possible answers to this question would likely find their representation somewhere among the myriad members of the species.  So it isn’t surprising that one of the inclinations James highlights is something like that of several Early Modern sonnets: to attempt to guarantee immortality through archiving one’s thoughts (or the youthful beauty of one’s lover) in writings and one’s writings in a folio. When Shakespeare records the living memory of his beloved, for “the eyes of all posterity” or Spenser uses verse to eternize the virtues of his, they did so with the reasonable belief that, even if no one found his writing or was inspired by it, someone COULD find it. Someone alive, later.  

For those living through the parallel universe of James’ book, there could be no such promise.  Recognizing that this might make the situation sound even more desperate, James presents, if ever so briefly, a source for hope on this front.  In the late 1990s, shortly after the last natural born human took his first breath, scientists had discovered alien life on a far off planet, thousands of light years away.  There is no contact with this lifeforce, no communication with its beings, no guarantee they had or ever would have the capability (or desire) to visit the literally posthuman planet earth.  Yet the glimmer of hope gives those inclined to speak to the ages the motivation to carry on.  As James tells it, “We are storing our books and manuscripts, the great paintings, the musical scores and instruments, the artefacts.” 

Every piece of human knowledge and culture would be carefully archived in as uniform a fashion possible, with as many redundancies as the system would allow.  Shortly, they would be sealed up as the last humans died off, so that when the alien life comes to earth, they will be able to learn what we were, what we did, what we thought, and, perhaps most importantly, how we felt about it.  It would likely take generations (assuming aliens live about as long as humans) of dedicated alien scholars poring through these archaic codexes of whatever variety they took before they could finally claim to understand us.  But to the hypothetical crafter of (hopefully) universal metadata standards, this possibility was enough.

James doesn’t give insight as to why the human race is dying - except to say that its inability to discover the cause of this disaster is the crowning insult of its misplaced faith in science. But it is not outlandish to imagine a time when something like this scenario could come to pass.  In previous years, nuclear holocaust topped the list - here the insult to science was that man was too active, discovered too much and then did things to cause it.  Still, at least there is agency involved.  In our current era, the most likely doomsday scenario is caused by us doing nothing at all: we know a great deal about climate science; we can predict with computer models what the sea-rise in Bangalore will look like; can calculate the human cost of this otherwise unimaginable catastrophe; yet for the most part, we do nothing.  This is the recurring lesson science fiction has to teach us: that we place too much or not enough faith in science, that we had the answer, but our hubris and greed kept us from turning the tide: in other words, our base humanity keeps us from using our science to its most enlightened potential.

This is a grim foundation on which to build the library of the future: a masoleum for the interstellar archeologists who might one day be interested in our culture.  But we really should look on the bright side: just think, when those aliens discover this vast trove of information they will be able to do whatever they want with it. While this could mean they use most of the storage media for fire wood or a coltan salvage yard, in the best case, they would be even more advanced than us, technologically, socially, and culturally.  In that case, they could create infinite copies to distribute throughout their society, drawing upon the networked knowledge of everyone to help interpret and understand the lost civilization they had happened upon in their travels.  

They would be free to reinterpret works using their own cultural framework, making sense of them despite (or even because of) the distance in time and space.  And this reinterpretation could take any form they liked and be redistributed and reinterpreted until the ideas and history we had bequeathed to this galactic posterity merged with the great mind of the universe and we achieved an immortality Shakespeare could not dream of.  All of this would be possible whether the works were from Shakespeare’s time, published in the nineteenth century, recorded in the twentieth, or released as an ebook in 2012.  All of this would be possible not just because diligent archivists kept track of it, or brilliant coders fabricated a Rosetta Stone legible to the stars, or curious extraterrestrials plugged away at understanding it: no, all of this would be possible because, for these incredibly fortunate future invaders, all the information in the history of the planet earth will be in the public domain.

Roundup post

  • danah boyd reprises her infamous manifesto on open access publishing, saying “Save Scholarly Ideas, Not the Publishing Industry.” I feel a little more sympathetic to junior scholars who send work to journals of the evil corporate variety, but she usually makes waves so its worth noting.
  • Andy Baio’s post on young people’s perceptions of copyright set the Twitter abuzz last Friday, surveying Youtube videos and users and finding that they have an almost comical misunderstanding of what copyright means.  The phrase “No Copyright Intended” or “No Infringement Intended” shows up often, indicating that many users seem to think their release of any claims on the material they have created (using others copyrighted material) is enough to shield them from legal action.  From this Baio proposes a thought experiment (on the lines Lessig proposes in Remix) of what will happen when these people reach voting age and are able to get elected to office. Rob Beschizza, on BoingBoing, notes that 

Isn’t it also interesting how many young artists still instinctively honor the idea, as they see it, of copyright? Respect for other artists comes naturally. People don’t stop respecting copyright until they see how little the claimed principles have to do with the reality of enforcement—especially when it’s used to condem their own creative expressions as a form of theft.              

  • Heather Morrison, an ABD student at Simon Fraser and powerhouse of information about Open Access resources, provides her “early year end” report on the success of open access.   From her perspective, the emerging challenge of Open Access is the challenge of success: “How can we track all these resources and make it easy for people to find and use them?”  This seems to connect Open Access with the library and information sciences in a very direct way, namely, while creating new, legitimate platforms (and, as boyd points out, practices) is essential, just producing open access scholarship isn’t enough: we need to develop new forms of curation and data management for that scholarship to be useful.  
  • On that topic, it took this story from across the pond (Economist) to alert me to the CHNM initiative Occupy Archive, which is collecting materials from and about the Occupy movement for the purposes of historical preservation.  

Without some system for organising, collating and preserving the Facebook pages, YouTube videos and blogs the movement is generating, the materials may be lost. For archivists, the question is not whether Occupy movement has political legs, but if its history has a future.

  • Michael Robertson analogizes digital music with hot dog vending to show both the absurdity of contracts with record labels and in reason Spotify and other platforms will never make a profit in the current environment.  In the process, he reveals information that had previously been shrouded by nondisclosure agreements (just as Big Deal journal subscription packages with libraries have been for years). For me, this is further evidence that the morass of licensing books for a massive e-library would likely be an unsustainable nightmare in the current legal environment.  These initiatives would be made unsustainable by the people with the most to gain from their success, namely the copyright holders like the record industry. As Robertson describes it:

The supplier will always elect the formula that captures the largest amount of money for themselves, completely disregarding the financial viability of the store. If the store miraculously managed to generate a profit, the landlord would simply raise the rates after two years.

  • As if to cement this instinct, Librarian in Black reveals the fact that Amazon’s Overdrive catalog for ebooks is different for different libraries.  The Analog Divide asserts that this true of other vendors as well. Since these arrangements are likely shrouded in the same sorts of NDAs, it becomes hard to compare the deal you are getting - or even to understand what the deal you are getting entitles.

This is what happens when we well-intentioned librarians are expected to negotiate deals with these companies – and their experienced contract lawyers. We expect them to share our values of open access and sharing, while they’re beholden to their own profit motives. Essentially, we’re bringing hugs to a knife fight.

  • More on Libraries as Hackerspaces, this time from NPR
  • Canadian artists are lobbying to legalize file sharing, which should make Canadian torrent site isohunt happy.  It would be paid for by a P2P tax, which might make Canadian internet users sad.

more, soon

Contrary to many futuristic projections—even from bibliophiles who, as a group, enjoy melancholy reveries—the recent technological revolution has only deepened the affection that many scholars have for books and libraries, and highlighted the need for the preservation, study, and cherishing of both.

- William Pannapacker in The Chronicle, talking about the continued relevance of books as material objects and bookstores and libraries as sites of serendipitous discovery.  The need to preserve or approximate serendipitous discovery is an ongoing theme I hear often in relation to the potential transformation to a purely digital ecosystem for books.  Pannapacker spends most of his column discussing the continued aesthetic appeal of books as objects (a fact publishers are keen to), he is also concerned with how those objects work as components of a system of discovery.  Library stacks and bookstore shelves provide a different sort of organized chaos from Amazon’s “recommendations”  which tend, in my experience, to favor more recently published books rather than the “deep tracks” you might find sitting on a library shelf.  The nostalgia people feel for this is also pragmatic: finding unexpected books in this way is a mysterious, organic process which defies algorithms alone.  

And that’s part of the problem: most people’s everyday experience with e-books and e-libraries is based on like Amazon.com or Google Books, where, on the one hand, browsing the stacks is impossible and the adjacent texts you can discover are likely chosen by a mathematical formula rather than a more thoughtful set of metadata.  While these are relatively decent platforms for reading and even searching ebooks, they are poor methods of serendipitous discovery, at least as we normally experience it.  Amazon, for instance, provides on a sort of social network function, recommending books other people have also bought, and certainly I’ve found new books this way.  Goodreads recently launched a similar book recommendation engine which, as more people sign on, will likely become smarter at making predictions. The predictions, on the other hand, are based more on what other people like rather than what a bibliographer might see as a deeper relationship.  And anyway, seeing a few recommendations is not like browsing a shelf.  Google is beta testing its own version of a virtual bookshelf, which would be great if its metadata didn’t remain a complete disaster.  

 Like digital libraries more generally, the solutions (and problems) of serendipitous discovery seems to fall into three categories.  These are aside from the problem of actually getting and using the book or text once you discover it, but are related.  Going from back to front, the biggest problem is having content in the database.  In some ways, this is where Google has stopped with its process.  Get all the world’s information and put it online.  (I know they claim they will organize it, but when they say that they usually mean they will tell computers to do it).  This is a big problem, to be sure, as even I could create a perfectly organized, beautifully designed digital library of 45 books.  Populating that library with more volumes than the average physical library is one of the few things that makes it more appealing than walking over to the academic library.  Google and Amazon start from the content and work forward.  Their insufficiency is in the other two realms.  

One of these is metadata.  Though there is much more to it, if we are thinking of how to replicate the library experience, we should consider the backroom coding that helps organize the information on those shelves.  Metadata is a area I’m coming late to, being new to the library world, but it is also an area that is in flux.  The Library of Congress, for instance, recently announced that it felt the dominant model of metadata, MARC, should be slowly phased out.  This fits with the move towards forms of linked data, using Resource Description Framework (RDF) codes for every piece of information on the web.  CLIR, Mellon and Stanford recently held a workshop on this topic in relation to libraries and several of the DPLA Beta Sprint projects focused on either linked data or metadata interoperability. Importantly, this is the area where, despite its claims to the contrary, Google is in dire need of help from more invasive, expert forms of organization.  

But even with good content, well organized in the back end by good metadata, the average user will expect elegance and functionality in the solution to the most obvious problem: the interface problem.  Namely, how do you create an interface that provides the tactile satisfaction of walking through a bookstore or library, while having it still remain digital or virtual.  

Joe Esposito, writing at Scholarly Kitchen, takes a short cut.  He has proposed the idea of what he called a “Metadatatorium” where a physical space would remain to house the books, but the purchasing (or in the case of libraries, borrowing) would actually be done by waving your e-reader in front of a ISBD or QR code on the physical object.  In this, he’s inspired in part by this French video

Owners of these spaces would get a cut of purchases and could create more energy around their spaces by opening them up to performances, readings, book clubs, and so on. This would increase the possibility of serendipitous discovery as well as the communal and social aspects of bookshops.  Esposito doesn’t discuss how these books would be organized (i.e. what kind of metadata he’d rely on for their organization) and he seems to fall back on the organic, experiential sensibilities of the bookshop owner or library bibliographer for populating the content.  (Even more problematically from a legal and economic perspective, he prefers the agency model currently used by Apple’s iBookstore.  While the latter may have some appeal to publishers, this week both the EU and the US Justice Department are investigating this model for anti-trust violations.)

For a more virtual experience, researchers at the University of Calgary have elaborated several possible models of what they call “Bohemian Bookshelf Supporting Serendipitous Discoveries through Visualization.”  They begin by elaborating a complex understanding of how serendipity works, using a combination of personality traits (observation skills, open-mindedness, perseverance) and environmental factors (coincidence and prior categorizations of other people); then they speculate on what is needed to facilitate serendipitous discovery in a system, settling on four main factors: Multiple access points, multiple pathways, juxtaposition of information, and the flexibility to allow for curiosity and play.  They then speculate on how to organize books along a variety of axes and present them in a more organic manner according to these factors. As they describe it: 

The Bohemian Bookshelf consists of five individual visualizations: the Cover Colour Circle, Keyword Chains, Timelines, the Book Pile, and the Author Spiral. Each of the five visualizations provides a unique overview of the dataset from a particular perspective, as we will describe below in more detail. At the same time, the individual visualizations are interlinked with each other: the selection of a book in one visualization changes the views of the other four visualizations to in relation to the newly selected book.

They provide some illustrations of what this might look like in practice, helpfully collected here by someone else.

Their elaboration of a variety of interlinked interfaces is probably one of the best overall ideas—though it doesn’t seem all that deeply informed by metadata issues as the closest they get to a thematic arrangement is the keyword chain.  Add to this the fact that many useful manuscripts have no cover art at all (at least in hardcover) and it is clear the books this model has in mind are mostly trade books of some kind.  Still, the dynamic nature of the interface would allow for discovery of those volumes, provided they are part of the database and have the right keywords. 

The interface problem seems to be the other major concern of the DPLA beta-sprint projects.  The project bearing the greatest similarity to the Bohemian and Google Bookshelves is the project from Harvard.  It is a combination of a multilibrary, metadata-userdata “LibraryCloud” with a front end interface called ShelfLife.  Right now it suffers from having less content, but eventually it could be very effective as an engine of serendipity.  

Perhaps more innovative is the ExtraMuros project, which helps not only visualize collections geographically, but also allows users to curate data in a variety of collections. The DPLA page is here; and the demo can be found here.

My own ideal would actually require even more intervention, but would likely create an invaluable resource in and of itself. Not only would it aid discovery, but it would provide a visualization of deep connections between works.  I see the digitization of libraries as a unique opportunity to construct the outlines of another kind of “distant reading.”  The goal of this project would be to visualize the scholarly (and cultural) impact of a given work.  Ideally, a library of this kind would work more like Google Scholar, where books  and articles are included in the same framework.

I call it the Citemap. The proposition is this:  if/as we scanned/linked in the documents, we would pay special attention to the works cited and/or the footnotes.  On a basic level, the final project would show us, visually, what works each individual work had cited in making its argument, and more importantly, what the cultural importance (again, measured by citations) of those works was.

For example, take Raymond Williams classic examination of the idea of The Country and The City.  The reference section begins on page 167 of this pdf. Here the work in question, Williams’ book, would be the Node Work, the center of the node.  Depending on the filter you were using, you would be able to visualize either all the works that cited this work or all the works that he cited.  The size of any node would be determined by the number of citations.  According to Google Scholar, Williams’ would have a pretty good size node, as he has over 3000 other works citing his.  Likewise, most of the early works he cites (e.g. Virgil, C. Marlowe, P. Sidney) would have large nodes.  In each of these cases, it would be clear that both the work itself, and the works it draws upon are of some larger cultural significance. You could scroll over each node, ideally, recentering the study on a new node, checking how it fit within the larger network of both literature and secondary literature.are some central canonical texts—and what those are or have been at any given time (ideally you could also control for the timeline, rolling back the network to a snapshot of publication date to see when a work became popular or culturally/critically significant).  As we go through the data, figuring out a way to visualize these as a network would help to show the way these central texts are related to one another (or not.)

While there are a great deal of critical projects a resource like this could spawn, for the present purposes it would replicate in a virtual, visual way the most common source of my own serendipitous discovery: other authors’ bibliographies.  It wouldn’t have quite the tactile appeal of sitting with leather-bound volumes of cream colored paper, but there’s nothing to say you can’t go find a printed copy of the book you discover in the citemap (or the bohemian bookshelf, for that matter.)  

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