On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 12:01 PM, Nishant Shah <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Ashish, unlike most academic authors, has a very keen interest in keeping > his work Open Access and he has retained the rights for free digital > dissemination of the entire book and is hoping to make it Public Access. The > book will soon be available in a .pdf format for anybody to have a free > download and read. In the process of thinking about the digital > dissemination, we have now been having conversations about the form of an > e-book - or in other words, if things published online are not books, then > they should probably not follow the conventions of reading a book, and yet > be able to make a sustained argument and information dissemination using a > different form. Ashish is now suggesting that instead of treating the end > result online as a book, he is more interested in looking at what form can > the material he has (textual, visual, moving images, audio interviews) take > so that it can be most effective online. > > For a scoping exercise, he is right now searching for 'interesting' forms of > documentation online to see if an existing form appeals to him. I am, on his > behalf, placing a request here... What are your favourite sites for digital > documentation? Do you have any ideas on what form academic work or > scholarship can take if it does not have to simulate the printed book? Have > you come across (and hopefully saved) interesting spaces which you think > helped the argument because of the form of the documentation and its design? > We'd be quite grateful if we could get some links to start with and see if > it might help in thinking about the form of online publishing that might be > most conducive to online dissemination and reading. I have some thoughts around this, but am in the middle of a conference (in a break right now) so I'll just throw out this list of links for now: Thoughts about publishing and content: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html http://playfullibrarian.blogspot.com/ http://thedigitalist.net/ Actual acts of commission: http://craphound.com/content/ http://twobits.net/ Both Cory Doctorow and Chris Kelty are on silk. I hope they chime in on this thread. Additionally, maybe Gautam has some thoughts to share. The theme I'd suggest is to take advantage of the inherently many-to-many nature of the medium to make the book a *conversation* rather than a discourse. http://www.cluetrain.com/ Apologies if this is a rehash. Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
