Topic: The Future is Now

May 2009

A Proxy for a Future Blog Post + Book Expo America Schedule

I’m so very mindful of how remiss I’ve been in blogging—I’m generating lots of material that will wend its way onto this site over the month of June. Basically, for little spasms of thought, see my Twitter feed. And for what will functionally be essays, for the most part, see here, as frequently as I can bang them out.

The delay inheres in my efforts to try to figure out an entire cosmology for an economic ecosystem for writer-reader interactions—the chiefest complexity being that readers write/writers read. I can’t pretend that what I start posting next month will be the answer, or even an answer, but I want it to have some level of internal coherence.

Moreover, because I’ve two presentations at Book Expo America at the end of the week, I’ve focused this month of May on figuring out how to squeeze this research into a one-hour presentation, and a seven minute presentation (both replete with PowerPoint slides, a first for me, and the former in cahoots with my research partner, Dedi Felman…) So, for those of you attending (and I do urge you to go to BEA if you’re in this business—the trade show is the analog analogue, as it were, to the gorgeous social media network on which we’re all wee little nodes, and its anticipated demise is partly the result of our industry’s own benightedness about whom we should be reaching and how…), here’s my two dog & ponies…

The Concierge and the Bouncer: The End of the Supply Chain and the Beginning of the True Book Culture
2:30PM – 3:30PM (Thursday, May 28, 2009)
Knowing what we now know, about media and content in the digital networked age, and recognizing we may not yet know that much, let’‘s now ask ourselves: what might the ideal publishing company look like? Had we it to do over again, how would we build a system for connecting writers and readers? Richard Nash gave up his job in order to start to answer those questions and here offers his thoughts so far…
Panelist: Dedi Felman – (formerly) Sr. Editor, Simon & Schuster
Presenter: Richard Nash – (formerly) Publisher, Soft Skull Press

7×20×21 at BEA
Publishing’s most innovate thinkers talk about what inspires them
4:30PM – 5:45PM (Friday, May 29, 2009)
Join us for a most unusual panel: 7 speakers * Each with 7 minutes to talk about anything they like * Accompanied by 20 PowerPoint slides * That move forward automatically every 21 seconds * A unique event designed to inspire conversation, creativity, and passion for the future of publishing. It was born in the UK, where the most recent event at the London Book Fair was presented to a standing-room-only crowd.

Debbie Stier, Harper Studio; Pablo Defendini, Tor.com; Jeff Yamaguchi, Doubleday/Knopf; Matt Supko, ABA/Indiebound; Chris Jackson, Spiegel and Grau; Richard Nash, ex-Soft Skull; Lauren Cerand, independent public relations representative

And for y’all who can’t go, I will post as much stuff as the organizers happen to record, as well as the sequence of essays I’m writing for this blog that underlie these presentations…

Richard Eoin Nash, May 26, 2009

March 2009

Notes On Clay Shirky, Part the Third

This isn’t actually Clay Shirky on News but rather Clay moderating (after a fashion) a much-discussed panel discussion at SXSW Interactive yesterday evening. A conventional discursive blog post fails to do it justice so I’m offering embedded Youtube, the 250 tweets delivered mostly live, and a few after the fact . And link to three superb post-panel reflections, from Kassia Krozer and Kirk Biglione and William Aicher (this last dude is the questioner at the beginning of the YouTube clip)

All in all, it gets me itching to want to get started building the new infrastructure that can begin to offer writers and readers real opportunity.

Richard Eoin Nash, Mar 16, 2009

Notes On Clay Shirky on the News, Part the Second

The power of Clay’s essay derives in part, I think, from its cumulative power—he’s been saying these things for a while, and others have too, but Shirky took the trouble to outline them manifesto-like. So, to amplify his piece a little, I’m going to quote a few of them below, to give you a sense of the breadth of the emergent consensus, ad I’ll focus on the one of his concepts that is getting the most repetition, at the moment at least: “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

I’m first reminded of Simon Doumenco’s discussion of news-qua-cloud as opposed to news-the-thing in AdAge only last week in responses to an article discussing the Hearst Corporation’s involvement in an eInk r-based reader, Plastic Logic.

The Hearst e-reader project suggests that media executives just can’t stop clinging to the concept of news as a thing—news as a discrete product that can and should be purchased like milk or cereal or any other package good. It’s amazing that in 2009, that idea still has such a grip. Arguably a death grip…Once upon a time, it made sense for media executives to behave and think as if they were Procter & Gamble executives—package jockeys…: If only we could come up with a snazzier, hipper, more futuristic container for our product …

This actually puts the news people a step ahead of the book industry, of course—we’ve hardly done anything to even improve the container of the past 30 years. Most publishers are trying to reduce the number of trim sizes they print in, lower the weight of the paper, and so forth. (I was a big offender in that regard too, I’ll confess…). That said, it is absolutely clear that the book is a snapshot of a process and the present container used to house it, also known as a book, just happens to be a successful technology. In other words, these things are not fixed. Never were, in fact.

I’m then reminded of Bob Stein, yet another person exploring this process alongside Shirky, “a book is a place…” (Or, to quote myself “books are…the richest kind of social glue”…) “A book,” continues Stein, “obscures the social relations that underlie a book. They are much more a social experience than we realize.” Here Stein is again playing with the little bit of linguistic sleight-of-hand, the book being both container and contained, the former historically contingent, the latter as culturally eternal as any cultural form. The story. And stories are told. And from the beginning of time they were told, sometimes one person to another, something in small groups, or large ones. Told and retold. Stories that organized societies. Thus, highly highly social. And Shirky and Stein and Dumenco and me, we’re going to keep telling that story too.

For, to again quote Shirky: “‘You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!’ has never been much of a business model.”

Richard Eoin Nash, Mar 15, 2009

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I ran Soft Skull Press from 2001 to 2007 when we sold it to Counterpoint for whom I continued to run it until early 2009. I founded Cursor and am publisher of Red Lemonade. I now run content and community for the new cultural discoverer Small Demons. After the jump is my bio, since I know some folks come to this site looking for it, and I thwart them by not having a proper one. read more »