Today’s Best Website and a Little Open Source Theory for the Morning by risa
Bookner: Where Bestsellers are Born?
“In the Bookner Peer Review, raw manuscripts are reviewed by other writers to determine the saleability of a manuscript. The findings of the peer review are consolidated into a Bookner Rating, which allows literary agents and publishers to instantly size up the saleability of a book.”
The process happens anonymously, and reviewers are not asked to judge literary quality or plot development, only to imagine that they are in a bookstore holding this manuscript and deciding whether or not to buy it. Bookner is quite upfront about the fact that they’re looking for money-makers, not Nobel prize-winners, although, of course, there is no reason a great book can’t be both. They suggest that though readers will sometimes make a mistake- in a bookstore or in assigning their Bookner score- the results will average out into a reliable number, and will correctly identify best-sellers. On the Bookner Blog, developer Jason Gonzales quotes an article about Surowieki’s The Wisdom of Crowds to explain why his system must be successful:
“In an early example, Surowiecki refers to a study conducted by the British scientist Francis Galton. Galton was a believer in the power of the elite, noting “the stupidity and wrong-headedness of many men and women being so great as to be scarcely credible.” But at a fair, he noticed a wagering competition in which people bet on the weight of an ox. Eight hundred people participated; some were butchers and farmers, others just idle guessers. When Galton averaged the estimates, he expected the result to be way off. Instead, the crowd had come within one pound of the ox’s weight.”
Jason follows this up with bombastic delight: “This is why one person, be it an agent or editor or acclaimed author, can not hope to compete against Bookner: Bookner harnesses the power of the collective mind.”
I see his point, although this was an unfortunate example for me, as The Wisdom of Crowds happens to be one of those books that I bought excitedly (after much deliberation in the bookstore) and was seriously disapointed by when I got it home. Of course, I’m biased. I had just read The Success of Open Source, which is a brialliant history and political economy of a system Surowieki spends a few pages on, and was working on my own manuscript, No One Knows Everything, about open source and communication. So I was irritated to see many of the same old arguments in a polished and packaged little best-seller endorsed by other popular science writers and self-help authors. Authors in the 1950’s wrote texts that used almost the same exact arguments as Surowieki in order to define what made democracy good- Charles Lindblom’s “The Intelligence of Democracy” is just one example.
My grumbling and griping aside, Surowieki points in a positive and exciting direction by suggesting that we consider alternate forms of decision-making and knowledge building. And the gaping whole in the reasoning suggested by the title (what about when crowds, whipped to a frenzy by an emotional speaker, say, are not wise but violent, even senseless?!) is somewhat accounted for by the distinction he makes on pages 74-75:
“a decentralized system can only produce genuinely intelligent results if there’s a means of aggregating the information of everyone in the system…In the case of Linux, it is the small number of coders, including Linus Torvalds himself, who vet every potential change to the operating-system source code. There are would be Linux programmers all over the world, but eventually all roads lead to Linus.”
Code needs to be tested to see if it’ll work, to see how well it has been thought through, and whether it will play nicely with the rest of the functioning system. Linux and other successful open source projects like Apache are not exaclty decentralized, they are open sourced meritocracies. The people who have been witnessed over time making the best decisions are given authority (hence, meritocracy). And the potential for them to become dictators is undercut by the fact that the code is freely available and projects are legally fork-able. In other words, anyone could copy the entire Linux kernel and, so long as they cited it’s original authors, change it in any way they liked to try and make it better.
Bookner aggregates reviewer’s opinions with a secret algorythm, turning them into an averaged-out number for publishers to understand. There is no attempt to collectively improve texts, only to collectively choose the ones with the most merit. And I’m intrigued by the scheme and I can’t wait to see whether it will work: whether this anonymous crowd, unable to see other people’s thoughts or decisions, will be able to choose books that I’ll be glad to see published. If this system ends up only vetting works that represent the lowest common denominator amoung readers then it will have failed, and it will potentially convince publishers to waste more trees on more fatuous, irrelevant, low quality crap then the collective publishing world already produces. But if it manages to “magically” suss out the unobvious gems perpetually slipping through the cracks of the rigid hierarchy of the current agent/publisher system, then I’ll be there cheering.
For now I’m delighted to see programmers hitting this next stage in their craft; moving from writing software for programmers to writing software for other craftspeople, like writers. This is a sign of the good stuff to come from code, especially the deep wells of open source code, in the future.
The writing on the Bookner site is clear and strong, and the colours and layout are nice. There is a slight problem with the legibility of the writing on the front page of the site (under “If You’re a Writer…” and “If You’re a Literary Agent” the small text blurs into the background lines) but this is a small and quickly fixable quirk. On the whole, I say props to Jason Gonzales.
I’m going to go sign up!
October 3rd, 2005 at 8:56 pm
GO to antibookner.blogspot.com to find all the negative aspects of joining Bookner
October 5th, 2005 at 1:10 am
You can’t really call his blog a blog, because he disabled the comment feature. I question how effective he can be at getting what he calls ‘good’ writers published, when he is doing his best to alienate the publishing world. Two comments that my grandmother taught me, “Never bite the hand that feeds.” and “Be careful who you step on, on your way up because they’ll be waiting for you on the way down.”
October 5th, 2005 at 9:50 am
Hmm, Bonnie, that’s an interesting point. I really dislike it when people who are trying to make something new close themselves off to comments. I know Bookner’s not trying to be a community, and I’m alright with that, but there is a point where you have to demonstrate that you are willing to learn from other perspectives. Especially if you are building something that relies so heavily on a theory of collective intelligence. On the other hand, he does seem to be staying aware of the critiques being raised against him, or at least of the people who are linking to him.
I don’t know what all he’s been doing to ‘alienate the publishing world’ - I haven’t been paying too much attention to this website/software or to it’s author’s behavior around the blogosphere. If you are refering to the same bits of rhetoric from the Bookner site that seem to have upset the anti-bookner bloggers so much, well, to be perfectly honest, I think they’re being a bit silly.
Jason has come up with a unique idea that requires author participation for it to work. It requires a certain amount of author particpation for it to hit a critical phase and get off the ground, and before it hits that point he needs to explain as powerfully and convincingly as possible why he believes it will work. Whether he’s right or not we will only be able to see in a year, five years, maybe more. Hating on him for the analogies he uses seems unnecessary. I’m anti-nuclear proliferation, I’m anti-environmental recklessness, but I’m not anti-bookner.
The more important point that I’d like to make is that I don’t think Bookner poses a terrible threat to good publishers or agents or authors. I don’t think a system where authors- of whatever caliber, but diligent enough to have completed a manuscript- asign a number to the probability that they would purchase a text is going to be horrifyingly bad. I think it might articulate a layer of texts and opinions to the publishing system that will contribute to that system’s internet-enabled evolution. Rather then replacing people who love books, and who love looking for great new books to bring to the public eye, it might become a great ressource for them- a little something to add to their bag of tricks. It’s a system that doesn’t require any other system to stop doing it’s thing, but offers a next dimension of accessibility.
Whenever a new system threatens to interact with an existing system/culture there is a knee-jerk, reactionary fear. At this point, proponents of the new and old way can either solidify into enmity or grudgingly acknowledge that they both might not be perfect, that both systems might be able to learn from an outside perspective. I believe Bookner, a young system, seemingly built by one guy, is a kernel of a great idea that will grow into a brilliant idea by walking that fine balance between trusting its own instinct and vision and opening up to new ideas and admitting when and if he’s wrong. The current publishing system is not perfect either, and can certainly stand to be challenged by systems and by individuals who come into this artist/business world with new kinds of logic.
That’s what I think.
Thanks for your comments guys,
R
October 9th, 2005 at 4:55 pm
I agree with everything you said (mostly…but that’s another post) I have a real problem with sending a whole manuscript to someone that in reality you have no idea who they are. And, I have also done a not-so-confrontational blog about Bookner.