What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

Author:Jeff Jarvis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Technology & Engineering, Google, Web, Corporate & Business History, Strategic Planning, Creativity in business, Computers, General, Search Engines, Management, Information Technology, Information technology - Management, Creative ability in business, Technological innovations, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780061709715
Publisher: Collins Business
Published: 2009-02-15T07:23:26.614000+00:00

GoogleCollins: Killing the book to save it

I confess: I’m a hypocrite. If I had followed my own rules—if I had eaten my own dog food—you wouldn’t be reading this book right now, at least not as a book. You’d be reading it online, for free, having discovered it via links and search. You’d be able to correct me, and I’d be able to update the book with the latest amazing stats about Google. We could join in conversations around the ideas here. This project would be even more collaborative than it already is, thanks to the help of readers on my blog. We might form a group of Googlethinkers on Facebook and you’d be able to offer more experience, better advice, and newer ways to look at the world than I alone can here. I wouldn’t have a publisher’s advance but I might make money from speaking and consulting.

But I did make money from a publisher’s advance. That is why you are reading this as a book. Sorry. Dog’s gotta eat.

I already do most everything I describe above, not in this book but on my blog, where ideas are searchable and collaborative and can be updated and corrected—and where I hope conversations sparked by this book will continue. I believe the two forms will come together—that’s part of what this chapter is about. In the meantime, I’m no fool; I couldn’t pass up a nice check from my publisher, Collins, and many services, including editing, design, publicity, sales, relationships with bookstores, a speaker’s bureau, and online help. There’s a reason publishing is still publishing: It still pays. How long can it stay that way? How long should it stay that way?

As I suggested that papers should turn off their presses, I have a suggestion for book publishing: We have to kill books to save them. The problem with books is that we love them too much. We put books on a pedestal, treating them as the highest form of culture: objects of worship, sacrosanct and untouchable. A book is like a British accent—anything said in it sounds smarter, even if it’s not. But, of course, there are bad books. Any episode of The Office, The Wire, and Weeds, to name just a recent few, is better than too many books on the shelf. Yet we dismiss TV as our lowest cultural denominator, and we allow government to censor TV shows whereas we would not permit it to ban books. Books are holy.

We need to get over books. Only then can we reinvent them. Books aren’t perfect. They are frozen in time without the means to be updated and corrected, except via new editions. They aren’t searchable in print. They create a one-way relationship: Books teach readers, yes, but once written they tend not to teach authors. They cannot link to related knowledge, debate, and sources as the internet can. David Weinberger taught me in Everything’s Miscellaneous that when knowledge is frozen on a page it can sit in only one place on a shelf under one address so there is only one way to get to it.

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