Today, I attended a small, but really interesting conference chaired by my colleagues Professor Werner Wunderlich und Prof. Beat Schmid from the Institute for Media and Communication Management, our sister institute here at the Univ. of St. Gallen. The conference was on “The Future of the Gutenberg Galaxy” and looked at trends and perspectives of the medium “book”. I’ve learned a big deal today about the current state of the book market and future scenarios from a terrific line-up of speakers. It was a particular pleasure, for instance, to meet Prof. Wulf D. von Lucus, who’s teaching at the Univ. of Hohenheim, but is also the Chairman of the Board of Carl Hanser Verlag, which will be publishing the German version of our forthcoming book Born Digital.

We covered a lot of terrain, ranging from definitional question (what is a book? Here is a legal definition under Swiss VAT law, for starters) to open access issues. The focus of the conversation, though, was on the question how digitization shapes the book market and, ultimately, whether the Internet will change the concept “book” as such. A broad consensus emerged among the participants (a) that digitization has a profound impact on the book industry, but that it’s still too early to tell what it means in detail, and (b) that the traditional book is very unlikely to be substituted by electronic formats (partly referring to the superiority-of-design-argument that Umberto Eco made some time ago).

I was the last speaker at the forum and faced the challenge to talk about the future of books from a legal perspective. Based on the insights we gained in the context of our Digital Media Project and the discussion at the forum, I came up with the following four observations and theses, respectively:

Technological innovations – digitization in tandem with network computing – have changed the information ecosystem. From what we’ve learned so far, it’s safe to say that at least some of the changes are tectonic in nature. These structural shifts in the way in which we create, disseminate, access, and (re-)use information, knowledge, and entertainment have both direct and indirect effects on the medium “book” and the corresponding subsystem.

Some examples and precursors in this context: collaborative and evolutionary production of books (see Lessig’s Code 2.0); e-Books and online book stores (see ciando or Amazon.com); online access to books (see, e.g., libreka, Google Book Search, digital libraries); creative re-uses such as fan fiction, podcasts, and the like (see, e.g., LibriVox, Project Gutenberg, www.harrypotterfanfiction.com).

Law is responding to the disruptive changes in the information environment. It not only reacts to innovations related to digitization and networks, but has also the power to actively shape the outcome of these transformative processes. However, law is not the only regulatory force, and to gain a deeper understanding of the interplay among these forces is crucial when considering the future of books.

While fleshing out this second thesis, I argued that the reactions to innovations in the book sector may follow the pattern of ICT innovation described by Debora Spar in her book Ruling the Waves (Innovation – Commercialization – Creative Anarchy – Rules and Regulations). I used the ongoing digitization of books and libraries by Google Book Search as a mini-case study to illustrate the phases. With regard to the different regulatory forces, I referred to Lessig’s framework and used book-relevant examples such as DRM-protected eBooks (“code”), the use of collaborative creativity (“norms”), and book-price fixing (“markets”) to illustrate it. I also tried to emphasis that the law has the power to shape each of the forces mentioned above in one way or another (I used examples such as anti-circumvention legislation, the legal ban on book-price fixing, and mandatory copyright provisions that preempt certain contractual provisions.)

The legal “hot-spots” when it comes to the future of the book in the digital age are the questions of distribution, access, and – potentially – creative re-use. The areas of law that are particularly relevant in this context are contracts, copyright/trademark law, and competition law.

Based on the discussion at the forum, I tried to map some of the past, current, and emerging conflicts among the different stakeholders of the ecosystem “book”. In the area of contract law, I focused on the relationship between authors and increasingly powerful book publishers that are tempted to use their unequal bargaining power to impose standard contracts on authors and transfer as many rights as possible (e.g. “buy out” contracts).

With regard to copyright law, I touched upon a small, but representative selection of conflicts, e.g. the relation between right holders and increasingly active users (referring to the recent hp-lexicon print-version controversy); the tensions between right holders and (new) Internet intermediaries (e.g. liability of platforms for infringements of their users in case of early leakage of bestsellers; e.g. interpretation of copyright limitations and exemptions in case of full-text book searches without permission of right holders); the tension between publishers and libraries (e.g. positive externalities of “remote access” to digital libraries vs. lack of exemptions in national and international copyright legislation – a topic my colleague Silke Ernst is working on); and the tension between right holders and educational institutions (with reference to this report).

As far as competition law is concerned, I sketched a scenario in which Google Book Search would reach a dominant market position with strong user lock-in due to network effects and would decline to digitize and index certain books or book programs, for instance due to operational reasons. Based on this scenario, I speculated about a possible response by competition law authorities (European authorities in mind) and raised the question whether Google Book Search could be regarded, at some point, as an essential facility. (In the subsequent panel discussion, Google’s Jens Redmer and I had a friendly back-and-forth on this issue.)

Not all of the recent legal conflicts involving the medium “book” are related to the transition from an analog/offline to a digital/online environment. Law continues to address book-relevant issues that are not new, but rather variations on traditional doctrinal themes.

I used the Michael Baigent et al. v. Random House Group decision by the London’s High Court of Justice as one example (has the author of Da Vinci Code infringed copyright by “borrowing” a theme from the earlier book Holy Blood, Holy Grail?), and the recent Esra-decision by the German BVerfG as a second one (author’s freedom of expression vs. privacy right of a person in a case where it was too obvious that the figure used in a novel was a real and identifiable person and where intimate details of the real person were disclosed in the book.)

Unfortunately, we didn’t have much time to discuss several interesting other issues and topics that were brought up and related to the generation born digital and its use of books – and the consequences of kids’ changed media usage in a changed media environment, e.g. with regard to information overload and the quality of information. Topics, to be sure, that John Palfrey and I are addressing in our forthcoming book.

In sum, an intense, but very inspiring conference day.

– Urs G.

This post is cross posted on Urs Gasser’s blog here.

Writing a novel is one of those tasks many us want to accomplish “someday,” but for most of us, that “someday” never comes. Never fear, for National Novel Writing Month is here. NaNoWriMo, which takes place in November, challenges any aspiring writer to pen a novel of at least 50,000 words in one month.

If you’re questioning how NaNoWriMo is important to Digital Natives, consider its current success Could have NaNoWriMo have existed before the digital age? Well yes, it did. It began in1999 as a localized project among 21 friends who had some time to kill. But could it have been the success it is today with 79,000 worldwide participants? Perhaps the most appealing part of NaNoWriMo is the sense that We are in this together. Writing a novel is all-consuming exercise, and writing a novel in a month is something close to creative suicide. NaNoWriMo hosts a virtual network of support groups for experienced writers and budding novelists alike. What started out as a simple group of friends evolved into a Yahoo group and then into extensive online forums, with the number of participants exponentially increasing each time. Digital Natives have taken advantage of this online community to participate in NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo naturally draws out of the fanfiction (fanfic is considered a legitimate genre) and online writing community, which are composed of a relatively high number of young people. NaNoWriMo’s forums are subdivided into age groups, and it is under the Teens section where Digital Natives have come out in full force. This is apparent not only in quantity—the volume of posts in the Teens section is twice that of any other age group—but also in the nature of their interactions. While many of the posts are related to writing and NaNoWriMo, the forum is also peppered with threads like “Band geeks unite here!” and “Sweet sixteen birthday coming up.” For Digital Natives, the Internet isn’t a big, bad, scary place but a community within which conversations are to be had and friends to be made. There are plenty of posts asking for advice on how to juggle NaNoWriMo and college apps, and there are plenty of posts asking for relationship advice. These threads as well as the manifold threads in which Digital Natives swap their digital identities – screennames, LiveJournal, deviantART, MySpace, etc. – with others forum members exhibit a desire for interaction beyond just writing buddies. This is something unique to the Teens forum and nowhere to be found in forums geared toward older writers.

At a time with “mash-up” and “remix” are the current creative buzzwords, the novel isn’t the sexiest art form. The success of NaNoWriMo, then, has lots to do with the online community that has organically arisen in response to the inane challenge of writing a novel in one month. With NaNoWriMo, even an old art form like the novel—and maybe even the very process of writing a novel—is being dusted off and thrust into the Internet world by Digital Natives.

For something even more connected with the Internet world, check out NaBloPoMo – National Blog Posting Month. http://www.nablopomo.com/

-Sarah Z.

The ambition of young Americans to have an impact on our political scene may be our saving grace. Bravo to Scoop08 co-founders Alexander Heffner and Andrew Mangino for kicking off “A New Kind of Newspaper,” where 400+ students will cover the 2008 presidential campaign. If you grow up with a sense that you can speak and be heard, you may bother to participate more throughout your life. Experiments of the sort that they are undertaking give reason for hope that the Internet may yet help to fuel the civic involvement of young Americans, now and into the future.

– John P.

This post is cross posted on John Palfrey’s blog here.

One of the themes of Born Digital, the book Urs Gasser and I are working on, is excitement around the possibility of an emerging global culture of young people who use technology in particular ways. (We’re equally interested in the problems of those who may be left out of that emerging culture, too, as Ethan Zuckerman and Eszter Hargittai and others are quick to remind us.) It was fun, in this context, to see a few international responses to / reverberations of our post about definitions and subtleties around who is a “digital native” and who is not: one from Canada’s paper of record, the Globe and Mail; a few in Spanish; and a few in German; in Italian; and from our friend and colleague Shenja on the Media@LSE (London School of Economics) blog.

(Since this is a joint research project with our colleagues at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, I suppose it’s not really surprising — the conversation actually started internationally.)

– John P.

See the cross-posting on John Palfrey’s blog here.

The Digital Natives group blog goes live! Watch this space for posts by the project’s principle investigators, fellows, research assistants, and interns. We welcome all comments by all – native to alien, young to old(er).

Wish to continue the conversation further? Dive in and make an edit or two on our wiki.

While we celebrate the birth of our group blog, thinking on Digital Natives goes way back! Take a look at some Digital Natives @ Berkman history – view past posts by principal investigators John Palfrey and Urs Gasser.

-Miriam S.

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