What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [75]
Coelho Twitters. He uses a small Flip Video camcorder to record video questions for his audience via Seesmic.com, a video conversation platform. Inspired by his wired and eager assistant, Paula Bracconot, Coelho asked his fans to take pictures of themselves reading his books for a virtual exhibition at the Frankfurt Book Fair in celebration of his 100 million mark. Hundreds posted their photos on Flickr. Coelho also began inviting readers to his parties. The first time, he said on his blog that he would ask the first few readers who expressed an interest to a party he was holding in a remote Spanish town. Responses came in from all over the world and he feared that they expected him to pay their airfare. But they paid their own way, flying from as far as Japan. He webcast a later event and 10,000 people showed up online for it.
Coelho asked his readers to make a movie of one of his novels, The Witch of Portobello. With The Experimental Witch, he invited fans to film the stories of each of the book’s characters. If there were enough good submissions, he promised to hire an editor to make the final cut. He also found sponsors—HP and MySpace—to pay for the project. As entries came in, he sent me links to them. Some showed remarkable effort and talent.
Note the common thread—from collaborative news gathering to news remixes for the BBC to Howard Stern’s listeners’ song parodies to Lonely-Girl15 videos to Coelho’s open-source movie: Creation itself is a community. BookPublishing.com says 81 percent of Americans believe they have a book in them. None of them will ever be Coelho and Coelho’s books will always be his. But creativity inspires creativity and the internet enables us to turn that into a conversation. The moral of Coelho’s story, like that of so many here: It’s about relationships. What has the internet given him? “It gives me a lot of joy,” he said. “Because you are alone when you are writing.” But no more. His goal online is to find relationships with more readers and sell more books. Coelho still believes in print. He lovingly patted a 3-D book—a thick biography of his rich life—and talked about the form’s perfection.
Publishers treat Google as an enemy for scanning books and making them searchable (though you can’t read them all cover-to-cover at Google.com). Instead, publishers should embrace Google and the internet, for now via search and links more readers can discover authors and what they say and develop relationships and perhaps buy their books. Authors can reach the huge audience that never goes into a bookstore. Publishers and authors can find new ways to bring books into the conversation. Books can live longer and spread their messages wider. I don’t have the answers to books’ challenges. But I know we must be willing to reinvent the form. The internet won’t destroy books. It will improve them. Take Coelho’s advice to publishers and authors: “Don’t be afraid.”
Just as I was dotting the final i on this manuscript, Google announced that it would create the means for publishers and authors of out-of-print books to receive payment from readers who want access to the full text online (Google will keep 37 percent of the fees as commission). Google also may sell ads on pages with book content and share that revenue with publishers and authors. Sergey Brin told a Wall Street Journal blog that the payment system could be extended to video, music, and other media.
This offer came in the settlement of a suit brought by publishers and authors fighting Google’s scanning of books—seven million to date—to make them searchable online. But it is far more than a sop to angry book people. In one fell swoop, Google altered the life cycle and economics of books and potentially answered some