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book

I've been thinking about the concept of a book lately. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Sophie so I can play with it. As a repository rat, I feel I should be practicing new forms of scholarly communication.

I was recently given the opportunity to write a book proposal about institutional repositories. I hemmed and hawed and wound up procrastinating and missing the deadline for said proposal. Mostly it's because I'm busy. But there was something fundamental gnawing at me. Institutional repositories are all about digital objects. Complex digital objects. I was troubled by the thought that a traditional book may not be the best medium for information about about institutional repositories.

So I asked the acquisitions editor (the publisher shall remain nameless to protect the short-sighted) if they would be interested in supporting a new media web-enabled "book." They were unprepared for that type of publishing and could only offer the use of a website to accompany a traditional book if I ever got off my lazy arse and wrote that proposal.

Well hell's bells. I can make web sites. I helped instigate techbootcamp to learn how to install, configure and maintain scholarly communication tools and library services. (password=library) What the heck am I pitching publishers for? I should just go ahead and write the darn thing already.

The question next is -- how does one write an ebook? It depends on one's interpretation and vision of the "book." There are many uses of the word. We say, "he wrote a book" to mean he wrote a work in the FRBR sense -- a distinct intellectual or artistic creation. We say, "he does everything by the book" to mean a set of rules or a formal record of account, a list, a register. Keeping accounts is bookkeeping. We "book" ourselves into a hotel. Scholarship can be referred to as "book learning" (think of Cletus in the Simpsons...I ain' t got no book-learning!). It's a noun! It's a verb! It's a book! And we can't conceptually disambiguate it. We can't even draw it's borders. Hyperlinks can extend infinitely in theory.

The lack of boundaries is not a problem. I confess a weakness for literary theory. A book in that lexicon is a conversation between writer and reader engendered by the text (another amorphous term if there ever was one). In the social web, this conversation is made manifest. To communicate effectively within that conversation we need agree to where we are going to draw the arbitrary borders. An ebook to me then must enclose a conversation

What makes enclosure? In physical books we have a physical container. Case closed. The container is the enclosure. Unlike the traditional book we do not need to directly, tangibly, sense the physical container (the computer chip which holds the bits) in order to use the ebook. For our purposes of defining enclosure, the physical boundary of the computer chip won't suffice .

A reader doesn't need the physical container of an ebook but they do retain some sense of navigational structure, otherwise the conversations would never make sense. The radical thing about ebooks is that the sense-making is done by the reader as he or she chooses a path or paths through the hyperlinks as opposed to having the path dictated by how one person would arrange that information on pieces of paper.

It reminds me of the whole FRBR debate over descriptive cataloging of information containers. The FRBR entity groups are all types of containers we can apply to an operational definition of "book." Sevonious, in The intellectual foundations of information organization explicates an ontology of bibliographic entities which differentiates between conceptual and operational definitions. If you define bibliographic entities operationally, you can specify the boundaries of what is and is not bibliographic. In this sense a "book" is composed of it's attributes, no more, no less.

What attributes of the "book" then are worth retaining and what are new attributes of the "book" in an online environment? No fair shouting out hypertext! We know that hypertext is a transformative change in how books work. But is it new? Back of the book indexes are a print formatted form of hypertext. Ditto bibliographies. It is my belief that the structure of the traditional book can inform the electronic in terms of way finding. In my opinion it would be useful for ebook to think of a a book creator (and I use the word creator here quite deliberately in the Dublin Core sense), as being the entity primarily responsible for the work in terms of dictating its structure as opposed to its content. It goes beyond choosing and describing which elements will be collated to construct the "book" to include a role of facilitating content.

What the hell does this rant have to do with my book proposal? It's my rationale for taking my own damn sweet time with it. If I think of myself as a book creator in the new sense of ebooks for scholarly communication my logic extends to thinking that the book proposal (an outline, a sample chapter, some references, some market research) is not so far removed from the "book" itself. When we say, "she wrote the book on institutional repositories" we mean she wrote the definitive version. Definitions are commonly agreed to by communities of practice, so shouldn't the community of repository practitioners agree to a common set of concepts to be applied operationally to their "book" (and this has connotations of the biblical as in we wrote 'The Good Book').

The word is what we say it is. In that case, I'm going to invite all the community of institutional repository practitioners to write it along with me. We'll figure out the boundaries as we go and I'll try to create the structural enclosure.

update: 03/08/07 There is a new repository managers community at http://www.oaresearch.org -- a great place to find that community of practice, no?