let's talk about your 4 points, one at a time, ok?

> proofing

do you mean catching sentences like this one?:
> talking instead about the excitement exploring
> new technologies that can change people's lives

i think you likely meant "the excitement of exploring"...

so you didn't have to have a publisher who would
provide proofing for you, you got it from a reader.

so all an author has to do is put their work in front of
some readers who have volunteered to do proofing --
perhaps as a sign of their fanhood for the author --
and that work can be proofed up to a fairly high level.

-bowerbird

add proofing:
> It requires a new online tools

-bowerbird

Clever argument, bowerbird--and I'll definitely leave my typos in the article along with your comments on the site, so readers can ponder how much a proofread requires a professional copy-editor. I don't have the experience to argue that a professional could do better than crowdsourcing by readers, but I remain convinced that the lat two aspects of quality can be provided better by professionals.

> but I remain convinced that the lat two aspects

c'mon now, andy, it's like you're not even trying...

or should i say "its like your not even trying..."? ;+)

-bowerbird

p.s. i'll get to those last two. right after i rip your
"fact-checking" point into a million little pieces... :+)

Simply put: publishers can stay relevant if they are also "authors" (in some way) of the works they publish.

Example: conceiving a collective work and deciding the participation of the different contributors.

For #1, #2, #3 I'm not sure you need a publisher: you only need better tools, you can use a web 2.0 approach (bowerbird) if you have a fan base of some sort (a "tribe"), or you can buy freelance services.

All comments above demonstrate why and how the use of professional copyediting may enhance a discussion. An essential attribute for content access you may actually purchase.

A writer needs an editor, like an athlete needs a good coach, to help improve their performance.

Nice article (and great talk for BBB). FWIW, I divide "Editing unclear and ambiguous passages" into two quite distinct pieces: (1) clarification of poorly worded materials, and (2) true development work that includes considerations of pedagogy (such as pacing, prerequisites needed for each idea, anticipation of questions from a typical reader, etc.) and logical structure. The latter can really be seen as helping the author create a better manuscript in the first place, and that seems to me to be a real value-add for a publisher. It reassures readers ("This will be worth my time because it's obviously been thought out") and attracts authors ("I will use this publisher to get to a beter final product").

Occupational editing is a very tedious and complicated series of tasks. A professional developmental or copy editor surely won't edit any byte for free unless very very motivated. What would be the incentives for quality crowd-proofing/fact checking/coaching if not money? just the glory of it?

Editors have it rough. Whenever someone hears you're an editor they're twice as likely to point out the typos in your work. This whole post has become very meta as a result.

But seriously, thanks for the talk. I think you make a lot of good points. One thing I've been thinking a lot about lately is that a lot of people on the Internet conflate the ease of posting information w/ the ease of conveying information. Clearly to any trained editor these are not the same thing, and I think there is real value publishers can add in this realm as you point out. The question is how to do that while still being "part of the conversation" and how to do that and still be profitable. Perhaps part of the problem is that good editing is almost invisible. Good design stands out; a reader of a well-edited piece will do what they were intended to do, focus on the content and not on GUM, organization, or factual errors.

"Aegean Stables"? Your Herculean editor should've let you know that those are the Augean Stables.

> Whenever someone hears you're an editor they're
> twice as likely to point out the typos in your work.

i'm fact-checking your comment, tardiff, and i wonder
if you have a source for that "twice as likely" statistic?

no?

well, then we'll have to change it to "more likely" and
hope that we can squeeze that by the legal review...

it's a cute point; i'd hate to lose it to the lawyers. ;+)

***

however, as i'm sure is quite apparent to most people
-- including andy -- my notes about his typos were
definitely _not_ "meta", but addressed the very _meat_
of his arguments, by showing -- in a concrete way --
that his lack of a "publisher" for this post did _not_
mean that it was doomed to live forever with typos.

your readers -- assuming you have any -- will find
any typos relatively quickly, and -- if you want --
will inform you about them so that you can fix 'em.

and if you don't have any readers, well then i guess
typos in your work don't really matter a bit, do they?

-bowerbird

p.s. besides, anyone who is really listening can hear
tons of complaints about e-books being released by
big publishers today that have scads of typos in 'em.

max said:
> What would be the incentives for
> quality crowd-proofing/fact checking/coaching
> if not money? just the glory of it?

indeed. why would anyone do anything at all except for money?

-bowerbird

The survival of textbook publishers will depend on them leveraging the most important difference between entertainment and education. Entertainment just has to be, well, entertaining. Educational content has to be complete and accurate. Who has the editorial team to guarantee that what an author wrote is correct? Textbook publishers. Who has the production team to create a successful user interface for educational content, regardless of the delivery medium? Textbook publishers.
What’s keeping them from making the shift? Most of their revenue still comes from the sale of ink-on-paper books. But that revenue stream will dry up as surely as it did for the music business. Publishers have the ability to beat the rebels at their own game, but only by changing their business model to one that reflects the real value they add by guaranteeing that content is correct and user-friendly.
[From a comment I wrote on Susan Piver's February 11, 2009 blog post http://www.susanpiver.com/wordpress/2009/02/11/publishers-dont-do-what-the-music-business-did/]

ok, now we'll take on point #3, which is _editing_.

first, i'm glad andy admits up-front that "the give and take"
of online discourse can "compensate" for lack of editing...

in return, i'm willing to grant that all writers need editing.

however, some writers need editing much less than others.

editing is not something incompatible with writing per se.
for many writers, most writing is rewriting (a.k.a. editing).

andy, for instance, has done a good job with this post of
finding the internal thread and following it fairly closely,
and his various copy-editing flaws have no bearing there.

plus, even for writers who do indeed need a lot of editing,
it's not like they can't hire an editor. heck, given how the
publishing houses are laying off people, you can probably
find a high-quality editor who'd love to have you hire them.

but even with editing, it's not as if you can't get _excellent_
feedback from ordinary readers if you actively solicit them.

unclear or ambiguous passage? they will tell you about it.
assuming knowledge not in existence? they'll say "what?"

now, in some cases, they won't have the wisdom to know
how to fix the problems. but they will sure point 'em out!

o'reilly knows this. that's why they've put up experiments
letting the public give feedback on books being written...
(and i'm sure you know other publishers who've done it.)

but this isn't something that authors can't do themselves.

and -- as the range of experiments have shown clearly --
authors find that feedback to be overwhelmingly useful...

which means the smart authors _will_ do it, more and more.

> "A lot of people could have saved a lot of time
> if someone had just edited the document."

editing is extremely important.

but publishers do not
have a lock on editing.

-bowerbird

Editing is not (only) a matter of careful reading or rewriting or giving feedback: it's the unwelcoming craft of keeping a work at a distance while, as editor Jim Thomsen said, "passionately giving a shit". Before millions of invisible eyes made it unrewarding, one had once to learn it, practice it, and dedicate to it.

Bowerbird, I agree that opening up the publishing process increases the chances of catching errors, but you ignore my point that this is essentially a distraction. The amount of space spent discussing the typos in Andy's post far outweighs any substantive discussion of his main points, except insofar as proofing is one of his points, but in fact seems to be the point where he sees the most diminished value from publishers.

So we've spent the most time discussing the least important point. I think most authors would rather have readers discuss the meat of their argument rather than be distracted by typos, and thus proofreading still is of value, even if diminished value.

"and -- as the range of experiments have shown clearly --
authors find that feedback to be overwhelmingly useful...which means the smart authors _will_ do it, more and more."

Ok, where's your source for this, since you're so concerned w/ fact-checking? Publishers do not have a lock on editing, but they do have an expertise in editing that I do not see being wholly replaced by the crowd. The crowd might be able to replace #s 1 and 2 on Andy's list (though in an "authoritative document" you would not necessarily want the crowd to have to perform this role), but in my experience most people do not have the skill or the time to do #s 3 and 4.

The folks debating over reader-edited e-publishing mostly assume that authors and readers are intellectual peers, i.e., educated adults. An important role of publishing (and the cornerstone of the industry's revenues) is education. It's a big enough market segment to warrant its own debate.
Textbook authors and readers aren't intellectual peers, especially in the K-12 market. Those readers (students) are supposed to be learning facts and language skills, not compensating for authors' ignorance of the same.
Textbook publishers traditionally shouldered the accountability for the correctness of what got published. Those who argue that publishers are no longer needed in this role must answer to parents and taxpayers when they say: "We pay for schools where our children learn correct information and skills. Who do we hold accountable if what they learn isn't correct?"
If you take the publisher out of the loop, where does the buck stop? The parents? The classroom teacher? The local school district?
Who protects your children from learning world history from someone who denies the Holocaust? That job is too important for crowdsourcing. Let's not take the publishers off the job until we're certain that someone else will do it.

PublishingMojo: Your comments about textbooks are a good direction to explore, and they remind me that the recent announcement in California about digital, open textbooks came up at the same forum where I delivered the remarks in this blog. Unfortunately, forum attendees didn't know much about the California announcement, and neither did other people I asked. When more details are announced, that would be a good topic for TOC.

max said:
> Before millions of invisible eyes made it unrewarding,
> one had once to learn it, practice it, and dedicate to it.

editing hasn't been made "unrewarding", not by a long shot.

indeed, its importance will soon be magnified in importance,
rather than relegated to its prior status of taken-for-granted,
since the well-polished material will float to the top of the pile.

good writers know with certainty the importance of editing...

but there's another dynamic at work here too. writing is a skill,
such that the more you do it, the better you become at it, and
blogging is giving lots of people lots of practice at writing, so
they're getting better and better, and have less need for editing.

like i said, everyone needs an editor, but some need it less.

***

tardiff said:
> we've spent the most time discussing the least important point.

i'm discussing the points in order. i expect to discuss each one
to the degree that it needs to be discussed. as for everyone else,
including you, you are free to discuss what you think is important.

> I think most authors would rather have readers
> discuss the meat of their argument rather than
> be distracted by typos, and thus proofreading
> still is of value, even if diminished value.

you're arguing both sides of your own argument there.

let me know how you think it turns out... :+)

this is not complicated. good authors use spellcheck.
then they have some alpha-readers check for errors of
the type that andy made at first -- missing words, etc.
(these things are traditionally caught by copy-editors.)

then beta-readers comment on larger-scale problems,
such as sections that need to be rearranged, and so on.
(these issues are traditionally addressed by editors.)

by the time the work goes out to your full set of readers,
all of these problems should have been addressed nicely.

> where's your source for this,
> since you're so concerned w/ fact-checking?

first of all, see how fact-checking gets done in cyberspace?
you're called to provide supporting evidence for your claims.

almost all of the recent cases of publishing-house failures
in regard to fact-checking have originated from cyberspace.

so, to act like the publishing-houses do this thing _right_,
and cyberspace does it _wrong_, is to get it bass-ackwards.

now, as to your specific question, it's very easy to find authors
who say they benefited from involving readers in the process
-- just find the experiments where authors have tried it out!
most of the ones who have tried it have gotten good results.

if you don't know where those experiments are, you have not
done your homework, and you shouldn't be asking me to do it.
nonetheless, since i'm friendly, i'm happy to give you a pointer:
try the if:book people at the institute for the future of the book;
they've done 3 such experiments, and also developed a plug-in
called comment-express that other places have been using too.

you should also take a good look at pragmatic publishers...
they've been running a "books in beta" program for a while.

and 37signals has a book that grew out of their blog posts,
and i'm sure they'd tell you their audience helped shape that.

not every experiment goes so well... the "failures" generally
revolve around authors who don't seem to get any feedback,
either because they don't have core audience they can go to,
or because the book is straightforward enough that readers
don't have anything to suggest in terms of making it better.

but if an author does gets feedback, it's usually worthwhile...

-bowerbird

been waiting for someone else to point this out, but i guess...

bad> It attracted an usually large number of attendees
new> It attracted an unusually large number of attendees

-bowerbird

again, waiting for someone else to jump in and help show
that crowdsourcing your copy-editing can work all right,
but if i'm the only one who's gonna play the game, fine...

bad> someone reading an article will stop and as me
new> someone reading an article will stop and ask me

-bowerbird

bad> but if an author does gets feedback, it's usually worthwhile...
new> but if an author does get feedback, it's usually worthwhile...

You're it.

mojo said:
> You're it.

excellent! thank you very much! :+)

-bowerbird

p.s. in case anyone is wondering,
andy e-mailed me that he would
leave his typos uncorrected here
(even though he could fix them),
as a demonstration of user fixes.
of course, us comment-makers
can't edit our posts on this board.
but even if i could, i would leave it,
as a similar gesture toward the point.
it is doing someone a favor when you
point out there typos online, so they
can correct them. especially with
something like project gutenberg,
it marches their e-texts to perfection.

i said:
bad> when you point out there typos online
new> when you point out their typos online

i'm it. :+)

-bowerbird

Andy, I notice you read the NYT article about Michael Arrington's TechCrunch, but neglected Arrington's allegations of Damon Darlin's dishonesty and claim that between "Getting it right is expensive" and "Getting it right is cheap," there were, according to Arrington, "three paragraphs of dialogue."

I'd be more encouraged about trade publishers' place in editing internet content if you wouldn't treat the Times like gospel. Arrington's refutation of the image Darlin painted of him went up on TC ten days before you posted this, and four days before you spoke at the event in Boston. Why didn't you bother to read the content you position yourself to edit?

My own typos, my own need for an editor:

"I notice you read" = "I notice you've read"

"Getting it right is cheap" = "Getting it first is cheap"

Peter: I think in hindsight you're right. The question of what bloggers do is not central to the points in my article, and I didn't research the Times quote as thoroughly as I would research, say a topic I'm covering in a book. I was making a rhetorical point, and you'll notice the point I was making was that the quote was not representative of online publications.

So I don't think I did any harm, but I wish I had time to do in-depth research on this citation. It would have been more fair. But I'm sure there are other areas that deserve more depth, too.

Thanks for bringing this up: a confirmation of what we've all been saying on this comment thread about the value of comments.

ok, i think i've handled point #3 sufficiently...
but if anyone disagrees, they can specify why.

that leaves us with point #4 -- harmonization
of the contributions of multiple authors under
the unifying perspective of a single voice...

again here, i think andy has covered the yin
and the yang quite well.

and i think i even agree, for the most part,
with his conclusion that this is something
that can't be accomplished by "the crowd".

where i would question him, however, is
in how common this type of situation is...

when i think of "joint authorship", i think of
wikipedia. there, however, the n.p.o.v. need
helps to assure a consistent tone to the work;
people know how a dictionary is "supposed"
to sound, so they write to that internal sound.

otherwise, i don't see a lot of collaborative
authoring going on out there in the world...

there is some -- and andy is studying it --
but (perhaps because he _is_ looking at it)
i think he might be overstating its frequency.

in my view, anyway, part of what a book "is"
is the unique voice of a specific individual...

and this is perhaps where i diverge from andy
the most, but in the same vein as points #1-3.

specifically, i don't see this "unification" of
various voices as something a _publisher_
is solely qualified to do. no, on the contrary,
i think this is something that an "author" does.
or, even more accurately, something that a
"compilation editor" would do, or might do...

but again, i think compilations are uncommon.

and in spite of the fact that cyberspace makes
it much easier to produce compilations, i think
we are unlikely to see a big increase in them...

that's because i think that the singular vision
of an individual human being is a big part of
the appeal of a book. collaborative authorship is
less likely to produce the bright shining thread
that we see running through an excellent book...

-bowerbird

Matt Assay at the Open Road made a similar point to Andy's 4th point, but he is referring to interface design. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10274039-16.html

I hope to elaborate more on this later, but I think their may be some similarities between a interface design and publishing content.

>I think their may be some similarities between a interface design

Should be: I think there may be some similarities between an interface design

mojo said:
> Should be:
> I think there may be some similarities between an interface design

hmm...

i'd say this:
> I think there may be some similarities between interface design

-bowerbird

Good thought piece.

I wanted to expand one obvious point that bears repeating.

If a technical book has an inaccuracy, it can mislead readers or worse, cause readers to spend unnecessary time trying to debug. I know an Oreilly book has a better editorial process behind plus errata on their website (just in case). That has value to me.

I can't afford to spend my learning time trying to figure out what the author meant to say.

I agree that correcting ambiguity is also a major win. I often jump to the wrong conclusion about a technology because of a poorly worded paragraph.

By the way, despite the grammatical corrections on this post, blog comments almost never give constructive editorial feedback. I have a story site where I beg readers for editorial feedback (especially on grammar/punctuation/spelling). I get lots of readers and even feedback, but almost nothing in the way of grammar/spelling/punctuation. I have learned to make do without it.

Wikis tend to be more conducive to the grammar/spelling police. One reason is that random readers don't have specific roles. The chain of command at a newspaper or publishing house is used to assigning certain people to give certain kinds of feedback. I actually think a CMS can enforce these kinds of roles too, but the cost of free is that you have to try harder to motivate people.

Publishers do two things that are very difficult for the individual:

1) They can get an author's work into brick & mortar stores. In a way, that's related to…

2) Marketing, which involves sending copies to reviewers at every mid- and large-size newspaper and those magazines whose readers might be interested in the book, and sending the author out on book tours. For those of us who aren't comfortable with self-promotion, that's valuable.

Having found way too many typos and glitches in published works (paper), I consider copy-editing as necessary but not sufficient. As Bowerbird pointed out, there are plenty of editors who need work right now — but you have to give enough of a damn about your writing to make the editor really work at finding those last few typos. :-)

I agree with Andy Oram, 1500 words is a big blog post. I'm serializing a novel on my blog, and try to keep each episode to 1000 words or less (formatted as blog posts from the future). There are a few longer posts, especially early-on, but I was learning as I went.

and when you, as an editor, fail to do your job correctly,
your new worry in this digital age is that the audience
might just step in and highlight your inadequacies...

even if -- perhaps _especially_if_ -- you're the new york times.

> http://www.metafilter.com/83061/Ruins-of-the-Second-Gilded-Age#comment

-bowerbird

farfetched said:
> Publishers do two things that are
> very difficult for the individual:
> 1) They can get an author's work into brick & mortar stores.
> 2) Marketing

first, it's great to get feedback from someone who is doing it...

as to the two things you have found it difficult to do yourself,
you'll take heart that both of 'em are increasingly irrelevant...

> 1) They can get an author's work into brick & mortar stores.

aside from one giant left standing (probably barnes & noble)
the brick-and-mortar stores are on their _very_ last legs,
especially in terms of breaking new books by new authors...

there will be paper-book book-stores in the future, yes, but
they'll be more akin to specialty/collector/antique stores now.
(and old-or-rare-or-special p.o.d. books will be nice artifacts,
as valuable -- if not more so -- than anything mass-produced.)

independent authors will lead the way to e-books as foremost,
and publishing houses will follow because they have no choice,
being unable to create crowds big enough for large print-runs.
(the academic presses are now in the process of giving up print,
but the forces are the same wherever ink is being laid on paper.)

> 2) Marketing

collaborative filtering will make marketing totally superfluous...

the material we will enjoy will be delivered to us _seamlessly,_
without any search or effort on our part, virtually automatically.

(you have to rate everything that comes your way, so the system
comes to learn what you like, but that's not a difficult job to do.)

within a world like this, content that has to resort to "marketing"
will be seen as pathetic, and desperate; that'll be a kiss of death.

-bowerbird

Much of what are pointed out as services which publishers can provide are services currently provided by freelance editors as service for hire. Proofreading, fact-checking, and more intensive editorial shaping can easily be hired by the hour.

In the discussion of the 4th point of publishing as a pointer-service, I read:
"hardly anyone reads a 250-page book at once. No one has time...This very article, topping 1,500 words, is about as long a text as most people would tolerate."

This very sentence points to the real threat facing publishing, not one of digital competition as a different print medium but of the internet as an entertainment provider which is rapidly filling up the average person's leisure hours. For books to exist, whether online or in print, there must be enough readers who would consider it worth their while to take the hours necessary to read a book.

I would also like to say that I feel this point on the editorial services that a publisher can provide to individual authors is flawed in misunderstanding what publishing actually means to an author. Any individual can print a book using a vanity press. However, to have a book acquired by a publishing house validates the book as one that might hold the interest of a reading public. Is that a gatekeeper function? Yes. But to say that the internet rids publishers of that function is to assume that the general public no longer desires the service. On the contrary, when I have questioned many friends about the largest problem facing them in reading, they answered that they could not figure out what to read.

The book industry and its many facets (publishing houses, reviewers, bookstores, etc.) also function as taste makers, as shapers of a public by interacting with that public on various levels, whether it be reacting to what the industry assumes the public wants or by putting out books that the industry assumes could be good for the public (or most often a combination of the two).

While there are important books that would be published now by the standards of internet popularity (Shakespeare's plays for instance), there are also many works that would not survive such sheer numbers crunching (Thoreau's Walden Pond which so lacked for readers that the majority were bought by Thoreau himself). A lively public discourse is not bought about by merely offering the most popular work. Publishers take risks to invest in works that might be important to a category and hope to break even at least, and perhaps even make a profit. They hedge such works with books that could have more popular appeal. In this manner, many publishers have long worked to keep business alive even while helping crucial authors.

In this brave new world where publishers are expected to be mere editorial shills (hired by the hour), the role of publisher in helping bring intellectual content to the notice of the public will end. Even while the internet pretends to eschew capitalism by the notion of "free", the internet ultimately caters to capitalism with advertising and the notion that what matters to intellectual discourse are the texts with the largest number of users when what is shaped by the largest number of users is ad revenue.

If a publisher seriously and consistently takes on these four roles, they will develop a reputation for publishing quality work. Though publishers are no longer gate-keepers, their selection of authors and their treatment of those authors' work acts as an endorsement.

I would argue that while O'Reilly is an innovative publisher, the reason I have more O'Reilly technical books on my shelf than any other publisher is because of their batting average in choosing material and consistency in working that material.

That filtering and refining of information is worth real money (though it may sometimes be hard to extract that money when there's material that seems "good enough" available for free).

richard said:
> Though publishers are no longer gate-keepers,
> their selection of authors and their treatment of
> those authors' work acts as an endorsement.

have you seen what the major publishers are "endorsing"
these days? i'd say the scales have now been tipped, and
_more_than_half_ of what they're selling is just rubbish!

but that's immaterial. once we have collaborative filtering,
that's the only type of "endorsement" that we will need...

-bowerbird