Book: A Futurist's Manifesto

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Web Literature: Publishing on the Social Web (Eli James)

Eli James launched Novelr.com in 2006, and helped create the Web Fiction Guide in 2008. He has worked on the form and function of web-based books for the good part of 4 years, and is currently continuing that work at Pandamian, a company he helped create. You can find him on Twitter at: @shadowsun7.

There is a belief today, particularly amongst Internet companies, that “everything is better with social.” This belief is not unwarranted—as the rise of Facebook has shown us, social is central to all that is addictive and useful in the consumer Internet. One might argue, in fact, that “social” activities were the very thing that created the consumer Internet: the researchers that built ARPAnet intended it for collaborative research, but the social inventions on top of the Web—email, video chat, and Facebook—were what brought one’s grandmother online.

Today, we have social apps for photography (Instagram, Flickr), social apps for bookmarking (del.icio.us, Findings), and—more recently—social apps for reading (Goodreads, Readmill). But what of publishing?

Social efforts tend to be as far removed from publishing as homegrown YouTube channels are from Hollywood. But unlike Hollywood—with its movie premiers and cinema-going experiences—the future of publishing cannot be separated from the distributive platform of the Web. It is only reasonable to say that publishers will soon need to roll their own digital platforms. It is ...