Federated publishing takes all of the concepts I have dealt with so far – ease of online book production, collaboration, reuse – and applies them to a new networked model of publishing.
In the social software circles, there is a movement that advocates a Federated Social Web. The main advocates are ostatus and the free software micro-blogging platform status.net. The Federated Social Web is a vision of inter-operable social network platforms enabling “people on different social networks connect with each other as friends and colleagues,” says Evan Prodromou.
Federation of this kind is not new to the web, and there are many online services which work like this. Email is a federated system – it doesn’t matter where you have your email account, you can still communicate with other people who have email accounts elsewhere. However, federation of this kind is not the architecture of choice for monopolistic social network enterprises like Facebook. Facebook will not enable you to install your own copy of Facebook for your business or school, nor does it enable communication between users on Facebook and users on other social networks.
What we need is a federated architecture for online book production and publishing. Anyone should be able to set up their own online book production/publishing service and share books with other book production/publishing networks, enabling anyone to reuse any book, anywhere.
Federated publishing supports traditional, established book production techniques while fueling radically different approaches. To achieve healthy federated publishing on the web, four key elements need to be built up:
- Fee content
- Federated book production platforms
- People participating
- Suitable economic models
There is currently no prolific exploration of this model. Federated publishing is currently only illustrated, I believe, by FLOSS Manuals. In FLOSS Manuals, anyone can clone or migrate a book to another platform, reuse and change the book without permission, and publish it wherever they like. That is federated publishing.
Federated publishing was anticipated by this astonishing passage from Marshall McLuhan in Predicting Communication via the Internet (1966), in an interview with Robert Fulford, 8 May 1966, on CBC’s This Hour Has Seven Days):
“Instead of going out and buying a packaged book of which there have been five thousand copies printed, you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs, your problems, and they at once xerox with the help of computers from libraries all over the world, all the latest material for you personally, not as something to be put out on a bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct personal service. This is where we’re heading under electronic conditions. Products increasingly are becoming services.”
This passage is usually quoted as a prophecy of the Internet to come. However it is not a vision of the Internet, rather a vision of the book-as-service through federated publishing – an open network of book production platforms connecting people and books.
In contrast, proprietary publishing dominates the search for new distribution formats and economic models, reward systems for authors and others, and fuels an unwillingness to make content interoperable on a technical, legal, or social cultural level. It was this context McLuhan imagined we were escaping.
Through collaborative publishing projects, we have found that not only is federated publishing highly productive, exciting, and fun but there are also economies evolving around it – organisations and ‘crowds’ pay to have books produced this way, and they pay you to help them to do it.