Building Blocks For Books: After The Proprietary Model
Adam Hyde ( A H ) in conversation with Charles Stankievech ( C S )
Publishing and the democratization of knowledge have been intertwined since the invention of the Gutenberg press, which ushered a shift from the public religious mass to private scholarship and the critique of institutionalization. Until the printing press was invented, monastic libraries had a dual function of both publishing (through their scriptoria) and cataloging, which was bifurcated after the sixteenth century into presses versus libraries, with different responsibilities. In the twenty-first century we are witnessing how these machineries are merging again as libraries are looking for new roles that respond to and incorporate digital practices and possibilities. Furthermore, the manual quality of the old scriptoria seems to be reincarnated through the growing number of DIY online archives and publishing platforms, as well as the many small, often temporary and intensive, printing workshops.1 Artist-turned-information-architect Adam Hyde is positioned right at the nexus of these ideas by both developing a new online platform for the peer-review journals of The Public Library of Science (PLOS) and his Book Sprint interventions, which he has facilitated for powerful clients such as Google, Mozilla, The World Bank, and the European Commission, among a variety of organizations ranging from state ministries and educational institutions to small think-tanks and start-ups. As neighbors in Berlin-Neukölln, K. Verlag co-director Charles Stankievech and Adam Hyde met several times throughout the summer of 2014 to discuss publishing modalities, the future of the book, and especially the value of open source/open access. They continued this conversation online, fittingly on one of Adam’s collaborative writing platforms, while Adam was working in San Francisco and Charles was migrating from Berlin to Toronto. The following interview is the result of this exchange. CS
[Adam. I’ve written some questions below based on the conversations we had in person in Berlin about your projects. Some are repeats that I asked before and others I’ve formulated based on what you’ve told me and further 96
research I’ve done since we’ve talked. If you feel like you’ve already answered a later question in a previous response, then maybe just edit out the question, or feel free to re-arrange or make a note that perhaps a different way of asking the question opens up a more interesting