Is this whole e-book thing a self-fulling prophecy of the mass-market, mass-media world? If so, what does it say about the quality of the text produced by the companies that service those markets, the role of such text in society, and the difference between a surplus of evanescent fascinations versus those vital works of prose and verse that one wishes to preserve and savor for the ages?

All the buzz about Amazon selling more e-books than hardcovers therefore seems curious. In terms of pure economics, I personally almost never purchase hardcovers because they’re too expensive, the ones I own are always used and cost less than $5 — or, on occasion, something I splurge on because it’s special and I want it to stick around.

Generally, I purchase paperbacks. Amazon’s press release neglected to note the number of paperbacks sold, which underscores the fact that while the phenomenon of e-books outselling hardcovers is “interesting,” it’s also a calculated effort to boost their own brand, their Kindle reader, and the cultural phenomenon they hope to make much hay out of.

Thus, one wonders whether the journalists and news outlets feverishly reprinting Amazon’s press release about the triumph of the e-book may be doing just that — reprinting a press release.

The New York Times did better than that, however, in noting that paperbacks were excluded from Amazon’s calculation, and that the press release itself is a volley in Kindle’s sales and psychological battle against the iPad:

“Amazon does not specify how paperback sales compare with e-book sales, but paperback sales are thought to still outnumber e-books …

“Analysts said Amazon’s announcement could assuage investors’ concerns that the iPad threatens Kindle sales. Amazon’s stock price is down about 16 percent in the last three months, in part because of those fears.”

What The Times doesn’t mention is what this cultural trend overall means. I know there’s plenty of prognostication about the death of bookstores and print books, but I think a lot of it is akin to feverish goading rather than actual cultural forecasting.

I spoke with a bookstore manager yesterday at an author reading, and asked how business was.

“We can barely keep up,” she said.

Does this boost her hopes about her shop surviving the Kindle?

“Remember,” she noted, “we only need to lose 25% of our customers to the Kindle to go under.”

It occurred to me that part of that phenomenon, however, was linked to the cost of their rent, for a shop centrally located on a chic and busy San Francisco thoroughfare.

One other thought — perhaps the boom in e-book sales is linked in part to what Clay Shirkey calls “Cognitive Surplus” … there’s lots of time, lots of ideas, lots concept,  text and easy-to-access, easy-to-create media in the world now. In his review on Shareable.net of Shirkey’s new book, Paul M. Davis notes that:

“It’s as easy to post a lolcat as it is to report breaking news; as immediate to share a photo with friends on the other side of the world as it is to show it to a neighbor.”

I will add a corollary to that relevant to e-books, to wit: Print books are complicated, expensive and in the mass-market context, quite disposable. They are in fact a form of cognitive surplus, and not necessarily a good form. Perhaps we have too many lousy books out there, pushed out too easily by commercial mills with profit, only profit, on their minds.

E-books are easy and a great place to dump the stuff that shouldn’t have been in print in the first place.

When something deserves to be in print, needs to be in print, the market and the means will remain. Perhaps not on the scale and with the profit margins that mass-market media corporations demand, but … so what?

As Ursula LeGuin pointed out in her Feb. 2008 Harper’s essay, “Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading”:

“I also want to question the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly gloating—that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?”

E-books, hardcovers, paperbacks … they’re all media with a place and a role in society. When something is important enough to end up in print, it certainly will. For the rest, the Internet is an accommodating host.

Columbia Journalism Review weighs in on a controversial Pepsi-sponsored nutrition blog at Scienceblogs.com. It’s a fascinating parable on the negative impacts of commercial sponsorship on information media:

“At least two well-respected science journalists and a handful of scientists have canceled their blogs at the popular and heretofore highly respected ScienceBlogs.com community, protesting Seed Media Group’s decision to give PepsiCo a nutrition blog … Scienceblogs.com has [since] taken down the Food Frontiers blog, writing, ‘We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way.’”

My dearest hope for journalism — and the point of all my efforts since I quit my commercial-news day job nigh ‘pon ten  years ago — is that it adapts to the Internet as a medium, by adopting a decentralized organizational structure, in sync with the Internet’s basic/essential architecture as a network.

To wit: Power and access are distributed, everyone’s equally capable and embedded in a peer context, and thus the enterprise of journalism should focus on good process and good practice at the peer level: to facilitate collaboration, resource exchange, and the circulation of information/ideas/dialogue.

This is the philosophical underpinning of YOUR LOCAL NEWSDESK’s vision of a peer-to-peer network for journalists.

Now, check out this except from John Naughton’s essay in The Guardian, “The internet: Everything you ever need to know”:

“The answer lies deep in the network’s architecture. When it was being created in the 1970s, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, the lead designers, were faced with two difficult tasks: how to design a system that seamlessly links lots of other networks, and how to design a network that is future-proof. The answer they came up with was breathtakingly simple. It was based on two axioms. Firstly, there should be no central ownership or control – no institution which would decide who could join or what the network could be used for. Secondly, the network should not be optimised for any particular application. This led to the idea of a’ simple’ network that did only one thing – take in data packets at one end and do its best to deliver them to their destinations. The network would be neutral as to the content of those packets – they could be fragments of email, porn videos, phone conversations, images… The network didn’t care, and would treat them all equally.

“By implementing these twin protocols, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn created what was essentially a global machine for springing surprises. The implication of their design was that if you had an idea that could be implemented using data packets, then the internet would do it for you, no questions asked. And you didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission.”

Can you imagine? Journalists who don’t have to ask permission. Democracy demands nothing less. Decentralized peer communities make it all possible.

The speech by NPR CEO Vivian Schiller at the recent Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Las Vegas indicates that the wise teachings of the small, independent news nonprofit are going mainstream. The following key points from her speech are not new, but it’s great to see them made in such a high-profile setting:

Partnerships=good. Yeah. Competition’s in the blood, but teaming up multiplies impacts and extends limited resources.

Innovation=decentralized. She doesn’t actually up and say this, but the revelation is there, waiting for its moment:

“It’s a fascinating paradox that investigative reporting, often the most painstaking, labor intensive and sometimes solo form of journalism, has also been at the very forefront of experimentation and innovation.”

Let me suggest that rather, it makes sense the “painstaking … and sometimes solo form of journalism” is where the innovation happens … working on one’s own, or with a small team of collaborators, relieves, albeit temporarily, the news producer of the heavy hand of the vertical/institutional power structure.

Innovation happens in practice, in action, among the multitudes, in a massively parallel process of individual and small-group effort. A topheavy power structure just gums that process up.

Indeed, she notes the experience of NPR Executive Editor Dick Meyer’s “very first contact” with “the weird new thing called the Internet” at a similar IRE conference in the early 1990’s:

“At that early conference, he says he learned about ‘user groups’ to find sources and witnesses in disaster areas where phone and cell service might be out — what we now call crowdsourcing. IRE invented computer-assisted reporting and database reporting. You’ve been using social networks before they were called social networks — there were ‘gophers’, list serves, more user groups. Technology allowed reporters to use objective methods to develop and analyze empirical data — of campaign contributions and spending, of budgets, of pollution. Reporting about institutions could in this way move beyond the anecdotal, beyond personalities and even beyond conventional scandal. You — the people in this room — invented much of that.”

Precisely. Absolutely. Innovations in the use of technology do not happen in the board room. They happen in the lab, and in the field, where people are actively putting the tech to expedient usage.

Now perhaps I can shoehorn in a corollary to all this: The sooner that journalists can shake off centralized production and management models, the sooner the Fourth Estate will be able to live up to its idealized role in our democracy.

Investigations=fundability. About this, we shall see. While it is true that there’s a renewed interest among funders in supporting investigative work — a tacit recognition of the threat to democracy presented by what Tom Stites calls our “wildly corrupt” business/political milieu — the larger issue of philanthropic support for vital news and public-information projects and processes remains knotty. The need greatly outstrips the resource, at this time, for reasons that are far too complex for this brief discussion.

That stated, the renaissance that Schiller notes is indeed gathering steam.

However, it’s been a long time coming, and the work is hardly done. Indeed, it’s hardly begun. Much more infrastructure needs building, and much more systemic reform and reinvention awaits the courage and opportunity of those who care about the future of journalism and democracy.

Dan Gillmor delivers a fascinating essay in Salon.com about the value of open broadband infrastructure and net neutrality, which he compares to postal subsidies of early America and their defining role in advancing democratic participation.

Corollary to that is the notion that the government should otherwise not be involved with journalism subsidies, specifically because the newspaper/media industry has been “so transcendentally greedy in its monopoly era that it passed on every opportunity to survive against real financial competition.”

Large media corporations should also be paying for the free content that new journalism nonprofits such as ProPublica offer them. When commercial media take free content from news nonprofits, they are getting a free public subsidy, and are only deepening their disinvestment in actual content generation.

On the flip side, hollowed-out commercial newsrooms are great potential clients of third-party/nonprofit journalism providers. That’s no substitute for the hundreds-strong newsrooms of yesteryear, but it’s an intriguing “B2B” model that remains largely untapped by the emerging wave of new journalism nonprofits. There’s no reason those nonprofits need to be asking for gov’t handouts.

That’s the whole point of the Newsdesk.org project: Build a new network of nonprofit, third-party news providers, aggregate their work, and sell it.

While a public subsidy for journalism must necessarily not be used for propping up the lumbering dinosaurs of newsprint — public subsidy is indeed necessary to create ground-level infrastructure for civic dialogue and information exchange. And this is something that goes deeper than fiber-optic buildouts and net neutrality.

The issue is of singular importance to the small/non-corporate news producer, and in particular the nonprofit producer who may be doing important work that is off the radar of the commercial sector. You know — the type covering parolee health issues or pollution in low-income neighborhoods that causes asthma in local kids. Stuff that’s not very sexy, doesn’t sell ads, but is damnably significant in terms of our democratic pretensions as a society.

Even something as aggressively entrepreneurial as the Newsdesk.org model, which should be able to accommodate this kind of reporting, needs the public subsidy simply to get the model up and running.

Gillmor previously noted in a 2007 op-ed in the SF Chronicle that local, community foundations have a vital potential role in supporting this kind of work. The Knight Foundation seems to have taken a cue from that with their Community Information Challenge to get community foundations involved in local journalism.

Where I want to see public subsidy is twofold:

• For the creation of non-market-dependent fora for important discourse and information exchange that’s outside the market’s interest.

• For the no-strings support of focused civic inquiry that, again, falls outside the interest of traditional commercial markets.

While it could be argued that wide-open broadband infrastructure performs the same function as public libraries, town squares and the local Lyceum or civic meeting hall, I want to go further and assert that some form of staffing or curation is a vital part of that infrastructure.

By “public subsidy” I do include public money under private management by the private philanthropic sector, along with relatively novel (to the U.S.) ideas about directing some commercial profit towards non-commercial information exchange and inquiry. For example, a tax on ads, billboards, or electronic media hardware — the idea being that the price of commercial access to “the public” is the guarantee of the public’s access to non-commercial information and dialogue.

The make-or-break issue at that point becomes one of how the money is managed — and it’s a path full of peril for any management vehicle to navigate. The jagged rocks of Populism lurk, just below the water, on one side; the smooth and seamless cliffs of elite Meritocracy loom on the other.

Seems like an opportunity for some real social innovation!

Read a little more on the topic, in this interview with Stanford’s Ted Glasser on the potential for a National Endowment for Journalism.