The Digital Scholar

Following the success of social networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn, websites that use similar interactive formats to create online reading/publishing communities have begun to appear. By joining one or more of these communities, you can connect with other readers and writers, as well as publish your own writing electronically. Indeed, at no cost to you, you can easily use these websites to publish an entire book electronically and even sell it on the Web.

Below is a short list of some of these reading/publishing community websites. All of them are free to join and they don’t charge anything to publish your work on their site. They also use elements of online community websites to help you market your writing and to connect with other writers and readers.

Through these websites, you become the publisher of your own book by formatting and uploading the content yourself. In most cases, this process is very easy to do. Keep in mind, however, that when writing for the electronic publishing world, the less formatting your original manuscript contains the better. When you upload your writing to some of these sites, the website converts your text into a different format, so any special formatting your writing originally contains may get in the way of this conversion process.

You can make your content available for free on all of the websites listed below. On some of them, you can earn money by opting to charge readers to download and read your writing. There are many good reasons for making your writing available for free, however, foremost among them is that it will help you spread your reputation faster. Readers are much more likely to download your book if you make it available for free than if you charge money for it. All of the sites that give you the option to charge money for your work also allow you to set your own price for it, although the website will keep some percentage of that price.

Through these websites you can dabble in publishing your work without having to find a publisher for your book. All of them let you edit or even un-publish your book at any time, so they can be a great way to test out your ideas and gauge your market before finding a publisher for your book or article.

Even if you are not interested in publishing your work on these websites, you can find interesting works to read and comment on–and maybe even build a community of writers and readers with similar interests as you.

Goodreads – The Goodreads website focuses more on creating a community of readers than on a community of writers. As in Facebook, you create a profile where you can share what you have read with other friends, comment on and rate books, and even track your progress in the book you are currently reading. You can also upload your writing to the website by copying your text into their highly structured template, which organizes it into individual chapters. Writing uploaded by individual users, however, can only be read on the Goodreads website.

Feedbooks – Whereas Goodreads focuses more on sharing the reading of traditionally published books, Feedbooks focuses more on the sharing of writing. The profile you create in Feedbooks strictly centers on content available on its website, which is mainly works that have been uploaded to the website by its users. Unlike in Goodreads, this content can be downloaded in a variety of formats, including Kindle, Sony Reader, and PDF, so that you can take the writing with you.

Scribd – Scribd gives you a choice of uploading your documents to share (i.e., offer them for free) or to sell, and the uploading process is incredibly easy. The site offers all kinds of documents, including books, magazines, brochures, recipes, sheet music, and even resumes and CVs. The website also allows you to create communities, where books can be grouped together on a specific topic. Navigating through the morass of titles on the Scribd website can be difficult, but they tell me that they are working on improving the search and browse functions. Books published on Scribd can be read on the website or can be downloaded in PDF or plain text formats.

Smashwords – Smashwords works a lot like Feedbooks, but it allows you to create a more vibrant author page where readers can learn more about you. You can even add an author video to your page. Just like on Scribd, you can make your writing available for free or for purchase. Books can be read on the Smashwords website or can be downloaded in a plethora of e-book formats.

Do you know of any other reading/publishing communities on the Web? Share them by clicking on the Comments button for this article.

If you want to become a Digital Scholar, where should you start?

There are many easy ways to get the ball rolling in becoming a Digital Scholar, and you may already be doing some of them. Setting up an account with LinkedIn or Facebook to network more easily with friends and colleagues–especially those with whom you have lost touch–is one way. Setting up a Twitter account for similar reasons is another. You can go to Amazon.com and create recommendation lists to help other readers identify the seminal books in your field of expertise, or you can even start contributing articles to Wikipedia.

All of the above activities can help spread your reputation as a scholar. But if you are serious about preparing yourself for the new world of publishing, starting a blog is the best way to go.

One of the reasons why writing a blog is such a powerful tool for participating in the new world of publishing is that once it is up and running, you are perfectly positioned to utilize to the fullest the new publishing technologies for producing, distributing, and drawing attention to your scholarship.

Here are some other reasons why blogs are one of the best publishing tools for the Digital Scholar:

• Blogs are relatively easy to set up and maintain. Even though setting up a blog can be time consuming and a bit tricky at first, it is still much easier and faster to put together than designing your own website. Once you get your blog up and running, adding content to it is a breeze, so you can focus on your writing and scholarship, not website design. (See the Digital Scholar Toolkit for some links and tips to help you get started building your blog.)
• People can easily discover you and your scholarship through your blog. People turn to the web to answer questions and find information about topics that interest them all the time. Your blog can become an authoritative source on the web for providing information about your area of expertise.
• Blogs are a great showcase for you and your work. You can easily direct people to your blog, where they can gain a deeper understanding of what you and your scholarship are all about. You can include the URL for your blog in e-mail signatures, on business cards, and on your Facebook profile. If your URL is catchy enough, you can even verbally encourage friends and colleagues to check out your blog.
• You can build a regular readership with a blog. The regular-article format of a blog gives people who are interested in your area of expertise a reason to return to your site to read your next article.
• You become an instant author/publisher of your own work with a blog. As soon as you hit the “Publish” button, people from around the world can read and comment on your work. A blog is a great place to try out new ideas and see what people think about them before taking those ideas to a traditional publisher. It also lets you build or enhance your reputation in that subject area while you are still testing out those ideas.
• A blog can help you create content for other publishing formats. If you find the task of sitting down to write a book or journal article daunting, the short-article format usually associated with a blog can help you break your subject down into smaller chunks. Keep writing these small articles, and before you know it, you will have plenty of material for that article or book.
• You can use your blog to get a traditional publishing contract. If you write an active blog, you become more attractive to traditional publishers because of the attention you can generate through it.
• You can use your blog to advertise your book or other writing. Whether you publish a book independently, go through a traditional book publisher, or write an article for another venue, you can use your blog to market it. In turn, you can use these other writing opportunities to drive more traffic to your blog.

Blogs can produce big dividends for the Digital Scholar, because they are an idea and content generator, publishing mechanism, and marketing venue all rolled up into one. Blogs require some effort to get started, but once they are up and running, they can pack a powerful punch in the publishing world.

A Digital Scholar is someone who uses new publishing technologies to publish, distribute, and market his or her intellectual work. This definition paints a rather broad picture of the kinds of intellectual work this Digital Scholar might produce and the publishing mechanisms and strategies that he or she might use.

The wonderful thing about new publishing technologies is that they practically allow anyone to take advantage of them. This democratic approach to publishing means that anyone with an intellectual passion can now find a means of publishing and distributing his or her ideas and become a Digital Scholar.

Professors and other practicing academics who become Digital Scholars find that these new publishing platforms force them to rethink how they create and distribute their work, and in the process give new life to their scholarship. These Digital Scholars also find a far greater audience for their ideas than they normally would within the confining walls of academia, thereby helping to build their reputations to a scale that is far greater than what was before possible.

Independent scholars and other people who left the academic rat race to pursue other forms of employment find that by becoming Digital Scholars they are by no means abandoning the exciting exchange of ideas that universities seemed to monopolize. These Digital Scholars discover that publishing their own academic work allows them to define the level of scholarship they want to produce and in the course of doing so gain a greater sense of respect and authority for their thoughts and ideas than they ever commanded or found within a university setting.

Becoming a Digital Scholar does not require the use of a particular set of publishing technologies, because these new technologies can be combined and used in ways to suit the goals of any individual scholar. Some Digital Scholars write blogs, some publish e-books, some use social networking websites, like Facebook, to create intellectual online communities to facilitate the exchange of ideas, and some create podcasts or videos to distribute lectures on the web. Many Digital Scholars combine some or all of these publishing mechanisms so that they feed on one another and reach a greater audience. Writers of blogs might use its contents as a basis for creating an e-book and then use the blog to publicize the book.

Becoming a Digital Scholar does not mean completely abandoning the traditional publishing world either. Many Digital Scholars find that these new publishing activities help lead them to traditional publishing opportunities that they may not have found otherwise. In fact, participation in this new world of publishing is becoming a requirement before entering the traditional world of print.

Are you a Digital Scholar? Use the comment link to share your experiences.

[W]e have to rethink our conceptions of literary forms or genres, in view of the technical factors affecting our present situation, if we are to identify the forms of expression that channel the literary energies of the present. . . . [W]e are in the midst of a mighty recasting of literary forms, a melting down in which many of the opposites in which we have been used to think may lose their force.

. . . [This] mighty process of recasting . . . not only affects the conventional distinction between genres, between writer and poet, between scholar and popularizer, but also revises even the distinction between author and reader.

* * *

An author who teaches writers nothing, teaches no one. What matters, therefore, is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers–that is, readers or spectators into collaborators.

–Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 1934.

In writing the above quotations, Walter Benjamin was interested in identifying the qualities that mark a properly Marxist literary work. Even though the politics behind the writing of his article isn’t very popular nowadays, I am surprised that his essay doesn’t receive more attention than it does, given its seemingly prescient description of communication that is now possible with new information technologies.

At this point, I probably do not need to re-document how websites, blogs, and the ability of readers to share and respond to them have been recasting the way that popular media is produced and consumed. Traditional media outlets are struggling to figure out their role in this new economy of ideas and entertainment, and some media forms, such as newspapers, may not survive the recasting.

Instead, I am interested in how information technologies are recasting the author/publisher divide. New technologies have essentially reduced the costs associated with publishing to near zero, creating a situation where authors can cheaply and easily distribute their own work. Authors can make their own blogs, produce an e-book for sale or giveaway, or publish a printed book using print-on-demand (POD), and they can do all of these things for free.

Of course, some of these free publishing venues have catches to them. While it is possible to create a print-on-demand book for free, the printer will take a fairly big percentage of any sales of the book. And some free blog hosting sites will insert their own ads onto the pages of authors. The larger point, however, is that traditional publishers no longer hold exclusive keys to the production of creative works.

Nor do these publishers hold a monopoly on distribution and marketing. Blogs, of course, are available to anyone with an internet connection, but even independently published e-books and POD books can now appear on Amazon.com and other popular online book sellers, right next to titles distributed by big publishing houses.

There still may be good reasons for authors to publish their work through third-party publishers, but the line that used to keep author and publisher apart is beginning to blur. We are beginning to enter the age of the “Author as Publisher.”