I've been sitting on half a thought for a few weeks, since reading Hacking The Earth, and something Warren Ellis just wrote finished it off for me. And squared it and cubed it.
Hacking The Earth is a fantastic read and got me into the same anti-collapsitarian mood that seems to have seized Jones, but I don't want to talk about the content right now. I want to think about the form. Because, as I was reading it, it felt like a new, distinct, emergent form of thing.
It's mostly a collection of blogposts, which I could have read on the original blog, some of which I did read, some of which I didn't. But, firstly, it's a collection, reading them all together, in the order the author intended, with some commentary and context makes the experience different and better. And the fact that it's nicely printed and has all those nice bookish qualities obviously helps too. (I can scribble on it and dog-ear it.)
But secondly it's more than just a book. It's faster than that. It feels quick, contemporary, more like journalism. There's a piece in here from January 2009. That's very fast for books. That's fast for magazines.
Mr Ellis talks about the ebook/POD model like this:
"The thing that caught my eye about the Unbook was the idea of accepting a book as a version: an evolving beast that spits out periodic iterations of itself before crawling away to mutate some more. And it occurred to me today that that actually ties into the idea of the Battle Weapon — the 12-inch released to test new experiments in music (more commonly known as dubplates these days)."
I think that's the perfect analogy. I can imagine Hacking The Earth being updated, improved, used for testing all the time.
And doesn't that make you feel better about that book you were going to make with Lulu? It's not a vanity project, it's a battle weapon.