Project Webster: Print-on-demand Publishing

Project Webster: Print-on-demand Publishing

Image of the Freddy Kreuger Forever book cover.

Have you heard of Dana Rassmussen? Why not? Dana is the 'author' of some 1,000 books for purchase on Amazon.com. Don't believe me? Look it up.

Some of Dana's betting sellers include Celebrities Who Love Butt Sex like Pamela Anderson, Anne Hathaway, Tracy Morgan, Courtney Love, and More, Friend Me: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, and Social Networking, and Kings of Cartoons: Seth MacFarlane, Matt Groening, Mike Judge, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone. They're available, but supplies are limited--HURRY UP!

Truth be told, I hadn't heard of Dana Rasmussen, PROLIFIC WEB AUTHOR, until this week. I was going through my daily online browsing when this story on Gawker caught my eye. Rasmussen is the author of numerous print-on-demand books. As Gawker describes it, "Of the millions of print books available on Amazon right now, there are hundreds of thousands, like Celebrities with Big Dicks, cobbled together from two dozen or so Wikipedia articles and other public domain sources at almost no cost and printed in single copies by Amazon's sophisticated print-on-demand system, the byproducts of increasingly efficient publishing technologies and the glut of free, public-domain content available online."

Rasmussen (and many 'authors' like him) compiles public domain writing--things like Wikipedia articles--under broad titles (as you've seen above). He might add a little of his own writing into the mix--some slight nods toward curation, but the majority of the writing is obtained from open sources.

In writing about this, Gawker's Max Read makes an interesting point. "When we talk about the future of book publishing," he writes, "we talk about eBooks and the move from print to digital; here in front of me is the stunted result of a move in the other direction, an analog artifact of a weird moment in the history of publishing."

Indeed Project Webster, Rasmussen's publisher, is described by its parent company BiblioLabs's co-founder, Mitchell Davis, as follows: "Project Webster uses human curators to assemble Wikipedia content into new works. The platform is also a place for us to experiment with article-based book composition, and we are integrating non-Wiki content onto the platform also." Read hits the nail on the head when he writes, "BibloLabs thinks of itself as a software and technology company rather than a publisher, and as such Project Webster was launched not as a new business or a revenue stream but as 'a test curation platform.'"

Indeed, though we might think of these books as nothing more than print oddities, I see the potential for so much more. Why could this all matter to academics? I see numerous reasons.

First, this new print-on-demand technology is fascinating. Rather than anticipate the audience demand, this technology allows supplies to exactly meet demand. Think about that. If there is someone willing to pay money to read something you've written, then why not make it available for print-on-demand purchase? Who loses money in the process? So... if, for example, what you've written is about an obscure topic and likely to garner but a small audience, you can still publish it.

Second, I wrote a post titled "Awareness, Access, Motivation: a Call for Curation" in August of 2011. In it, I made the claim that content curation could be something akin to a new form of authorship. These books present an interesting new way to both curate content and have it published. Sure, they are in their nascent state (and may never exit it), but think about all those hours you've spent wikipedia surfing from article to article. Why not pull it together, polish it under some rubric (for example, I could call my activities last night "Down the Rabbit Hole: Courtney Love and Drug Addiction"), and publish it? Maybe, if you are good, you will have a fan base. Isn't this something like our era's equivalent of memoirs? I have a friend who, when she meets new people, gives them her 25 most played songs on iTunes. She believes, and I tend to agree, that it is a good representation of her as a person. Maybe being interesting nowadays isn't so much making new things as it is rearranging things that exist in novel ways. To that end, you are no longer what you think, but what you've searched. Why not put it out there?

Finally, all jokes aside, this all opens up the possibility that the space between authorship/curation and supply/demand are diminishing. And who, if anybody, can best benefit from this? Academics.