Dodie Smith is best know for One Hundred and One Dalmations, but her first novel is the whimsical and delightful I Capture the Castle, a book that commands fierce loyalty among its aficionados. As author Joanna Trollope puts it “I know of few novels—except Pride and Prejudice — that inspire as much fierce lifelong affection in their readers.” And that’s a thought I had in mind when reading Doc Searls‘ The Intention Economy.
I’ve found it a challenging but illuminating read because Searls’ understanding of I.T. and tech development, particularly within the open software community, gives the book great depth in (to me) unfamiliar waters. Searls has written for Linux Journal for many years and as he points out ...today, most of the sites and services we enjoy on the Net & Web (including nearly all of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia) are built on top of Linux or its close relatives plus Apache, another FOSS code base which serves about 60 per cent of all the Web’s pages. He’s also described by Thomas Friedman (author of The World is Flat) as one of the most respected technology writers in America. Although his point of view can’t be described as “neutral”, as a reader I feel in safe hands in this potted tour of the Web and his grounding in technology enables Searls to give what is essentially a profoundly human and economic proposition its proper technological context.
In contrast my experience of the publishing world is of a business community alarmed and threatened by technology and the Web, and this mindset has created reactive not proactive behaviours for too long (I know there are exceptions, but they prove the rule). Publishing is not helped by the fact that for decades those on the “creative” side of the business have held themselves as far off as possible from the nuts and bolts supply chain aspects of the business. I’ve written before about this and won’t reiterate those views here: for today’s purposes my observation is simply that this distance has compounded a lack of understanding of the (relatively simple) transaction technologies that facilitate the commercial supply chain for books – let alone an insight into or engagement with the wider tech development community that is creating the products and services driving massive changes in human behaviour across the globe. In literary and trade houses, commissioning remains a matter of being an arbiter of taste and fashion, whilst in academic houses, old approaches to textbook and monograph publishing (as stand-alone, go-to products) still prevail. This lack of understanding and insight into technology combined with lack of insights into customer requirements (more on this tomorrow) perpetuates a belief that publishers are guardians or even owners of intellectual property that must be protected at all costs. Publishing perceives itself as a “rights business”. It’s well known that my gut instinct is that for publishing to remake itself on the post-Gutenberg Parenthesis era, it must begin to perceive itself as a service business. Therefore it seems to me that a much deeper engagement with both technology and customers is essential.
Opening his chapter Your Choice of Captor, Searls quotes tech innovator Craig Burton saying in personal conversation, The term “client-server” was created because we didn’t want to call it “master-slave”. Searls writes Customers in too many cases are still assets to be managed. Implicit in this mentality is belief that the best customers are captive ones and therefore a “free market” for customers means “your choice of captor”. This phrase struck resonances for me with the whole “to DRM or not to DRM” debate and the associated issue of selecting an ebook reader (Kindle, Kobo, Nook) equating to choosing your captor. In the ereader example, the captor being which particular vendor you tie yourself to to purchase ebooks (a decision usually determined by the choice of device.)
It’s a chicken and egg question to ask whether Searls or Burton coined the phrase “your choice of captor” – but on 10 June Burton put up a post titled: Freedom of Choice! = Your Choice of Captor on the blog at Kuppinger Cole (who describe themselves as Europe’s leading analysts on Identity Management, Digital IDs -and More). In this post Burton discusses his first take on Microsoft’s work on their Cloud-Based Identity Metasystem. The post points to a 2008 white paper Proposal for a Common Identity Framework: A User-Centric Identity Metasystem by Kim Cameron, Reinhard Posch, Kai Rannenberg. I’m not savvy enough to know who commissioned this white paper, but I do know that at the time of publication, Cameron was a digital identity expert at Microsoft. The “requirements” section of the paper covers Freedom of Choice, as follows
5.4 Freedom of Choice
Freedom of choice for both users and relying parties refers to choice of service operators they may wish to use as well as to the interoperability of the respective systems.5.4.1 Choosing Operators
Users need the freedom to choose operators from a number of context-specific operators as well as more general operators.5.4.2 Interoperability
Interoperability is a prerequisite for choice. It allows the use of multiple technologies as well as the use of multiple platforms and devices from multiple vendors while shielding users and system programmers from having to understand the underlying differences. In particular, the framework services at 6.3 and 6.5 aim at enabling choice through interoperability.
I have reiterated this text here, rather than merely hyperlinking to the source, because it is so relevant. Quite some time back the tech community woke up to the fact that keeping customers in software or systems silos is not viable as web-based services become more sophisticted. Just as we require free speech (though not all of us have it written into our nation’s constitution), we require freedom of movement across the Web. The Web long ago ceased to be merely another broadcast medium for passively received content – it is a proactive medium where people use content for their own purposes. And I’m not talking piracy – I’m talking creativity. This is a fact and an unstoppable trend that poses fundamental challenges to rights-based businesses. Neither ebook readers that trap customers into one delivery channel nor business models that seek to restrict rather than release content are going to cut the mustard for much longer (if they do now). Brian O’Leary’s Context First has become industry shorthand for this notion (even if few of us know how to act on it). In timely posts today Rebecca Smart the innovative CEO of the Osprey Group Bring Back the Magic (a post at ORGzine – The Open Rights Group), and Suw Charman-Anderson Publishers Must Adapt or Die (Forbes) both address these issues.
It’s the Castle (or according to Rebecca the magic) we need to (re)capture. Not the customer. Customers form profound attachments to books like Dodie Smith’s precisely because they are free to do so. Paradoxically – in the new tech era – we’re more likely to inspire such profound loyalty by using technology to liberate content, add value to it and enable others to use it than by locking it up in solitary confinement.
Tomorrow: Customer Service DIY SOS
Thanks, Sheila.
I especially like your observation “Publishing perceives itself as a ‘rights business’” — when it needs to be a services business. You’re giving me the courage to finish writing a current column about this. It’s close to home, since I am out of alignment on this topic with my main two publishers.
Yet I am also in sympathy with their need to feel some degree of control. The challenge for publishers is to move from control over what others can do, to control over what only they can do — and what makes their business uniquely appealing in the marketplace.
That’s tough for one of the oldest businesses in civilisation.
Doc, my thinking on how such an “old” business deals with change was considerably altered by reading (of all things) Hugh Casson’s “Libraries in the Ancient World” (pub. Yale). Yes, scrolls and the codex existed two millennia ago, but authors were writing for influence not payment (authors of academic monographs may still recognise this) – and it was copyists who made a living – not authors or publishers. No-one has the “right” to make money from books (or content) – what exists is the possibility for businesses to arise and make money by meeting needs. It is just that over history the place that needs are met; how they are met and who they have been met by have all shifted. In the ancient world it was by scribes, in the Renaissance it was by Printers, following the copyright act it was by publishers (who like Walter Scott were sometimes also authors). Later, agents joined the fray to meet the needs of authors. The business models relating to books, writing and content have never been static…
Not sure if this applies, but a chapter cut from The Intention Economy was on the history of double-entry bookkeeping, which was first described — in language still in use today — by Luca Pacioli, a priest, mathematician, and friend of Leanardo (for whom the latter’s Euclidean drawings were made, and who may have also inspired the Vitruvian man), in Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità, a textbook written, not long after Gutenberg, in vernacular Italian, for teaching what the merchants of Venice knew better than anybody. It was given away, presumably. Money may have been made somewhere, but the motivation and value arose from service, not scarcities artificial or real.
I bring this up because a case made in that chapter is that loss of double-entry bookkeeping (when the world went to spreadsheets and single-entry through Quickbooks and Quicken) might be one reason why we as a culture have lost track of the connection between real value and economic well-being, and the re-centering of economics from relationship to transaction, and from symbiosis to might-makes-right winner-take-all value systems.
Have you read (or attempted to read, for it is huge) Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change? Much in there to support your (or our) arguments, methinks.
Doc
I haven’t read Eistenstein’s book – however it is exensively quoted in the much less demanding Kindle Single Gutenberg the Geek (and which is due to be the subject of a future post). Interestingly – and related to your point about double entry book keeping – one of the most useful sections in Jarvis’s essay is the section on Gutenberg’s capitalisation and cash flow (aka what went wrong).
I think you were wise to cut the book keeping chapter – it’s a whole separate book – and one that needs to be written. I think it’s more complicated than just the loss of such transparency and balance. I found Niall Fergusson’s The Ascent of Money very helpful. Something that really bothers me about the shift to the cashless economy is a further diminution in our sense of the relationship between money and value – or for that matter – what we earn to what we expect to be able to buy.
And finally (for now)- if you haven’t tried the Leonardo app from Touch Press – you should. It’s worth every cent of the $13.99.
Thanks. I’ll get the Leonardo app. But I’ll hold off on Gutenberg the Geek, because it can be read only on a Kindle, which is an example of the publishing as a “rights business” rather than a services one. Bad enough that music bought through Apple is rights-limited to run only on Apple devices. Now we have books that can be read only on Amazon devices and apps. My friend Jeff Jarvis (who wrote Gutenberg the Geek) is cool with that, but I’m not.
Not only are e-book formats now a skyline of proprietary silos, but the only popular open format, ePUB, can’t be read on a Kindle.
This is an example of how digital technology can actually be worse than analog. It provides boundless ways by which we can be, as Walt Whitman perfectly put it at the dawn of the Industrial Age, “demented with the mania of owning things.”
Co-incidentally I’m taking part in a debate about Amazon tonight at @thenakedbook Radio Litopia – I think its going to be a firey one.
My own personal compromise re Kindle is to run the app on my iPad. That way I’m caught somewhere in the space between two gilded prisons. It is where I read The Intention Economy and the brilliance of it from a use point of view was (a) I bought it and received it the instant I knew I wanted it and (b) the hyperlinks to original sources.
If its any comfort I think many publishers have woken up to the fact that ebook formats as they are currently available probably represent a worsening not a betterment of their situation, and are regarding them as a first voyage whilst preparing for a much bigger enterprise. Remember – within four years of returning to England, the Mayflower had been broken up and sold for lumber!
Thanks for including “Context first” as a reference point. Toward the end of the presentation, I named ‘four implications’ for publishers that I think make the ideas actionable. I expanded upon these in a series of posts in June 2011, named “Thing one” to “Thing four” (a kind of tribute to Dr. Seuss, but not much of one).
Even with that additional information, I think that publishers have to do more than say “tell me how this fits in my world.” The premise of “Context first” is that the world has changed; we need to adapt to it, not the reverse.
This is not a criticism of your work, which I agree with. It was once possible for editors, for example, to consider the supply chain as a responsibility of an “other.” That is no longer a sustainable approach.
Hi Brian
Indeed – and to echo my previous reply to Doc – the question is not so much “how does this fit my world?”, but “what is the need, and where is that need met?”
Any tribute to Dr Seuss is a good tribute